


Aftermath

by tielan



Category: Justice League - All Media Types
Genre: Angst, Consequences, F/M, Friendship, Infidelity, Justice League (neither animated nor comics), Love, Soul-Searching, Superman/Wonder Woman cheating
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2005-04-08
Updated: 2005-04-08
Packaged: 2018-12-19 22:40:02
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 8
Words: 27,766
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11907675
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tielan/pseuds/tielan
Summary: Everything has an aftermath. They are not allowed to escape this one.





	1. tainted

She felt tainted.

At her hip, the lasso branded her thigh with a scar nobody could see. She’d thought of taking it off, changing into civilian clothing and putting it in her bag where she wouldn’t have to feel it searing her soul.

Then she’d decided that the burning in her soul would be better than remembering the last few hours.

She set down lightly in the still, guano-tinged air of the Batcave. Her senses told her it was crisper and colder than the Watchtower had been, but she didn’t actually feel the cold.

Not against her skin, anyway.

His chair before the viewing screens was empty. She wasn’t sure if she was thankful or disappointed.

“Miss Diana?” Alfred’s voice echoed through the high, dark shadows of the cave. “I’m sorry. If Master Bruce had told me to expect you...”

“It’s alright Alfred,” she said quietly as she climbed the stairs. “He didn’t know.” Then again, knowing Bruce, maybe he did.

And if he had expected her, then what did that say about him? What did it say about her and Kal? Would they have been that obvious? Had there been a way they could have avoided this?

The lasso was a blistering flame, seeking out her self-deceptions and the pretty lies she wanted so desperately to believe - a sop to her pride, her courage, her strength.

In the guilt of what she’d done, pride, courage and strength were ash and dust in her mouth. The knowledge that she would have comfortably gone on with the self-deception if it were not for the lasso only scalded her more fiercely, brutal in its honesty, painful in its truth.

She had once been the goddess of truth. And sometimes the truth hurt.

Alfred came close enough to see her, to take in her state of body in a single glance - and, doubtless, her state of mind as well. Bruce had learned his insights into human minds from this man; and the student, while inspiring, was still no match for the one who’d taught him.

It was not Alfred’s condemnation she feared.

It was not his condemnation she wanted.

“Master Bruce is out on his nocturnal activities. He will most likely be some time. Will you wait in the kitchen, or the sitting room?”

He expected her to choose the kitchen, but hid his surprise when she chose the sitting room, solitary and alone.

Her lasso burned.

He set her up in the sitting room, stoking the fire and waving away her assistance. And she shivered, although not from the cold she didn’t feel, but from the heat of her guilt.

Alone in the room while Alfred got her a drink, she tried to shut her eyes, but could not cast out the images branded in her mind. She could not forget the way he had felt against her, smooth skin and powerful muscles. His mouth and hands on her body, sexual hunger, need and want, nipping them both cruelly.

She opened her eyes, gasping at the flare of the flames, at the burning truth of the lasso. Hephaestus’ forging, with the brutal fire of the gods, seeking out lies and deceptions in her mind, and the awful truth of what they had done.

_Betrayal._

He was not free, and they had known it, even in the midst of passion. He had bound his life to another woman, sworn promises of exclusivity of body, even if he could not keep to exclusivity of heart. And she had been complicit in his fall, not stopping anything that had happened this evening in the aftermath of the fight.

Guilt had been easily put aside, then; the safe knowledge that the woman whose prior right to him would never know of this, that it was just once, that there was something between them that all the laws in the world or off couldn’t surpass. It wasn’t until she had reclothed herself that the lasso’s scalding touch told her what she had pushed away.

Anything between them would be a lie until he was free.

Now, she felt tainted.

She had avoided his touch as she left, managing a smile that fooled neither of them. And she took the transporters to the Watchtower rather than flying home, her soul incandescent with the guilt of what they had done. Her hand had paused over the co-ordinates for the Batcave: she had not typed them in. Instead, she had chosen a setdown point outside of Gotham, and flown offshore before angling in towards the cave.

She didn’t know why she’d chosen to come here, to him - why not go home as she’d initially intended?

Already, Diana knew that she would get no sympathy from him. There would be no comforting words, no kindness when he realised what she had done. He had made plain enough his concerns, voiced once in their presence, and left at that. He had made plain enough his distaste that anything had to be said at all.

And she had believed her friendship with Kal to be innocent.

Her soul, accustomed to courage, now cowered in fear. Was this what guilt did to you? Hollowed you out and made you empty, a shell of what you’d been?

The lasso’s fire had never scorched in her soul like this before.

It was only an hour before he came home, and she sat there in an agony of body and spirit until he did, trying to search out why she’d come to him, afraid of the answers.

Bruce was expecting her when he came in. That much was obvious.

So, too, was the instant loathing that crawled across his features, unhidden by the mask, beyond even his powers of control.

It was all the response she gained from him before he said, “I see.”

He asked for no details. It was plain he wanted none. But there was a kind of sadness in his voice, beneath the veneer of anger she could feel in him. “Why did you come here?”

She didn’t know. She truly didn’t. But she gathered the loops of the lasso in her fingers and tore it from her hip to hold it out to him. “It burned me.” Like a child, bewildered, lost, far from home and with no way back. There were no lights in this forest, no trail of breadcrumbs, no fairytale ending.

Only the bleak, uncompromising planes of his face, handsome by firelight and the softened glow of the lamp. Her judge, jury, and executioner: the most demanding one she could find and the only one she trusted to give true judgement.

He looked from her to the lasso she held out, and the cords of his throat tightened. “You’ve just cheated on Lois, and the only reason you’re sitting here is because the lasso of truth burned you?” His scorn burned her, flayed her alive, like Marsyas before Apollo’s wrath. “Put it in your bag, Princess, if that’s all that bothers you. Do what the rest of us mere mortals have to do with the ugly grey truth of our lives: push it to the back of your mind and keep your delusions.”

Her fingers closed around the loops of cord in her hand, gripping it as though she could squash it with her strength. “My love for Kal is no delusion!”

“No. But your actions tonight were, however based in ‘love’.” He spat the word as though it were foul in his mouth, and pointed at the lasso. “You know it already if you’ve felt its truth.”

No kindness in him. Not for the fallen.

“I...” The words halted in her mouth, stopped as though her throat had been filled with clay. The sob caught in her throat and she appealed to him. “Bruce...”

“Why did you come here?”

“Because you know what to do!” The lasso still held her in its grip of truth; bald and brutal, it tore through her. “Because I trust you. Because you know how to make this better.” She shut her eyes against the merciless blue of his gaze and spared neither of them quarter. “Because I love you.”

She felt his shudder, even with her eyes shut. It rippled through the air between them, like knives flung forth to embed in fragile flesh.

“Sorry, princess,” he said. “I don’t take cast-offs.” She heard the slightest motion of his head, up and down as he surveyed her. “Especially fresh ones.”

The insult pricked her. She didn’t ask how he knew it was recent. Her eyes flashed open, “Did you spy on us?” Outrage flamed in her; bad enough to feel tainted over something that had been so pleasurable: worse to know that he had looked on, watched like a voyeur, and said and done nothing...

And what would saying or doing anything have changed?

There had been that one warning, that one observation, cold and plain before two he trusted to listen and heed. Two who dismissed his concerns and teased his paranoia - only to prove him right in the end.

He snorted with derision, “The two of you have been pushing boundaries the last few weeks, and now you sit in my house with guilt all over your face. And you think I’ve been spying on you?”

“Your paranoia is well-known.”

“So is your ‘love’ for him.” She could hear the inverted commas around the noun and flinched from it.

She had nowhere to go but retreat, and her pride wouldn’t let her do that. Instead, she met his eyes cleanly, feeling them spear deep into her heart. “What happens now?”

His mouth twisted slightly. “‘ _Don’t ask anymore._ ’” It was a quote from somewhere - she couldn’t quite place it and he gave her no time to do so. “Will it happen again before Lois is dead?”

He said it so coldly, so inhumanly, that she stared at him. His acceptance - his assurance - that she would someday go back to Kal was horrific; like discovering a worm in an apple. But the lasso compelled her answer as much as the lancing gaze that bored into her, taking her measure.

“No.” Not because it had been bad, but because she could feel the wrongness inside her, leech-like, sucking her insides out. Such intimacy with Kal should never have felt tainted, and by taking what was not hers before it could be hers, she had made it so.

 _They_ had made it so.

She’d have done better to seduce Bruce. Assuming he would even have wanted her.

_Cast-off._

She shuddered. Never mind that she had been the one to come here, that it was her will that brought her here; her will, and the lasso that still hung, fiery in her grip.

“Then you and he deal with each other and take measures to ensure it doesn’t happen again.”

“It’s not that easy.”

“Or you don’t want to make it that easy?” He shrugged. “I’m not asking you to go cold turkey on him, Princess.” And there was an ugly note of mockery in his voice. “Just avoid situations that will get you into trouble. Stay out of temptation’s way.”

His mockery spurred her to retaliation: “As you avoid me?”

He kept himself like a priest, fastidious around her. Watched her, yes, but with the cool measure of a strategist, not the hot eyes of a lover. Sparred against her, yes, but with the coldly inhuman fire of his personal drive for betterment. And if his heart beat a little faster in her presence, so did the pulses of all men.

He spared neither of them in the one soul-searching, blue-fire glance that locked her eyes to his. “As I avoid you.”

His acknowledgement angered her, spurred her to action. The coils of the lasso were dropped as she strode across the floor to him, full of thwarted desire, pricked pride, shame and guilt and the knowledge that this man she respected so highly currently loathed her with every cell in his body.

Diana pressed against him, gentle and coy, felt his muscles tense even further, writhing into knots along his shoulders and back. He did not try to escape her, or elude her touch, not even the hand that ran down his chest and stroked over his crotch. She felt him tremble as his flesh stirred and swelled beneath her touch, felt him quiver with the strain of holding knife-edged control over his body.

His hands did not reach for her, his head did not tilt down to her upraised face, and although the flesh beneath her hand yearned at her touch, the rest of him was stiff revulsion.

Bruce made one sound of protest or longing, and turned his face away from her. He turned aside, stepping out of her clutches with sweat across his brow and his teeth so tightly clenched, she could imagine the enamels melding into each other.

His leaving was like ice, miring her soul in cold guilt, even as the lasso had burned it earlier tonight with bright truth. “Bruce...”

He turned on her, and this time the fire in his eyes was desire, but even as she watched, he leashed it: master, not servant to its passions.

And she suddenly knew why she’d come here tonight. Why she’d sought this man out above anyone else in the world.

Because he knew what to do, yes; because she trusted him, loved him, even - although it was a fire she’d banked up in the back of her heart, preferring the blaze of Kal’s inferno to the steady embers of Bruce’s love, such as he gave it - but above and beyond all this: because he controlled himself.

Tonight, earlier tonight, had been a matter of control. The slow erosion of the barriers she had erected between herself and Kal, taken down over time, one by one as they flirted and laughed and played with what they knew was dangerous, but which excited them nevertheless.

Delusion, indeed.

Diana took a deep breath. Her emotions roiled within her, conflicting serpents that flared and struck, flared and struck, their constant tuggings poisoning her mind. “What happened tonight...earlier tonight... We lost control.” It was blurted, like a confession, and she saw him force himself to listen. “We’ve been losing it for a while.” The truth of that admission freed her soul, giving her enough to speak the truth in return. “I need...” Her voice broke. “Control. I need that back.”

_Or it will happen again. And again. And each time a little more of what is between us will be poisoned, until there’s nothing left between us but wrongness._

He looked at her. Said nothing, but just watched her, studying her.

The silence was excruciating, but she endured it. She had spoken the truth: she needed what he could give her, what he could teach her. Somewhere, amidst the discipline of her body, she had somehow lost the discipline of her emotions - especially where Kal was concerned.

She needed it back.

Finally, he shifted and his voice was like a gavel echoing in the panelled room. “You can stay in one of the spare rooms tonight if you need to. Alfred will see you there. Or out.” It was a dismissal, but also an acceptance of the truth of her words.

And in that acceptance was also agreement. She heard it, and knew that he knew she’d heard it.

He walked past her to the door of the sitting room, and she picked up the lasso and followed behind him.

If the old butler had heard what transpired between them, he was the soul of courtesy, merely suggesting that ‘Miss Diana’ follow him to her room.

She turned back to Bruce, and caught him on the edge of retreat to the sitting room. “It won’t happen again, Bruce.” Her throat clogged with guilt and grief and regret. She didn’t even know if she referred to sleeping with Kal, or her clumsy attempt at seducing him.

The faintest hint of a smile flickered across his face. There was no amusement in it, merely a sardonic derision. “We’ll see.”

And again, she didn’t know which event was being referred to.

In the silence of the room, she stripped from her garments, standing naked in the darkness, and bound her lasso around her waist. The feel of Kal’s touch on her bare skin was a delight in tactile memory, but the taint of it remained in spirit.

_What had she done?_

She felt the first tear trickle down her cheek as she began seeking out the lies in her mind and her heart, hunting them down one by one.

And the lasso burned.


	2. burden

Alfred found him sitting in the big chair by the fire, his head in his hands, wishing he could go back out patrolling. He could do with something to beat up. Again.

“A quiet night in Gotham, I take it?” The irony was heavy in the old man’s voice.

“In some parts, anyway.” Bruce lifted his face from his hands, weary beyond measure. “Is there anything to eat?” Hunger was clawing at his stomach. It matched the pain clawing at his heart, and the fear clawing at his mind.

“I offered Miss Diana cookies earlier,” Alfred said calmly. “She refused them. They may no longer be fresh from the oven.”

“They’ll do.”

“Would you like them here, or in your room?” It was a measure of Alfred’s discernment that he was offering Bruce the chance to eat cookies in bed. Alfred generally disapproved of food in bed, like a good, upstanding butler who had to wash the linens at the end of the week.

“My room,” he said, finally. Why refuse a good thing when offered?

That thought stuck with him as he left the room, trusting to Alfred to bank the fire and switch off the lights.

_Why refuse a good thing when offered?_

He wondered if it had been that simple when it came down to it.

Diana and Clark. Clark and Diana. Together. Making love.

His neck and shoulders knotted at the thought, and his stomach roiled. He had no need of spying on them, as he’d told her earlier with scorn. His imagination painted pictures more vivid than he cared to know. He shoved the mental images deep into the recesses of his mind and concentrated on the matter that concerned him.

The consequences of what had happened tonight.

He had not asked for details, and was extremely grateful that she had not provided them. There were limits to his self-control, and he was fairly certain they did not extend as far as listening to her ‘ _mea culpa’_ , let alone declaring her ‘ _te absolve’_.

She had come to him, asking his help. His forgiveness? No, she had known she would not get forgiveness from him. But she had come to him anyway.

In a way, it hurt to know that he was nothing more than the fix-it man. The one who could make it all unhappen, who could set things to rights. The man with the plan.

It hurt. Almost more than the knowledge that she and Clark...

No. Actually, it hurt more. A lot more.

Because she and Clark had been, in many ways, inevitable. Now, or maybe later, it would make little difference in the end. Of course, later would have been more palateable than now, but Bruce knew that life was not given to coming in palateable chunks.

He’d seen it coming, crack by insistent crack, with neither of them noticing how thin the ice was upon which they skated and unwilling to take his word for it. That hurt, too. The dismissal, contemptuous, as though they thought he was overreacting. He knew he hadn’t, with all the arrogance of the Bat. And this was his proof.

In his room, he peeled the shirt off his shoulders, tossed his trousers over a chair. His cock ached a little, just the faintest twinge of brief desire that flared but found no satisfaction. That stillness had taken every ounce of self-control, even through his fury that she should use him like that, that she thought he might desire her once she’d realised that Clark was unavailable.

Oh, his body had lusted, but his mind had been revolted. And his self-control had been absolute.

Unlike Clark’s earlier tonight.

It tore through him like a batarang, inserted at his navel and dragged up to his breastbone, slicing him up the abdominals, baring his guts before digging in beneath his ribcage and excavating his heart.

Yes, Batman had a heart. Surprisingly fragile for all that he’d been through. And wasn’t that why he’d put the layers around it, kept the women away with the dichotomy of the leering playboy and the self-contained vigilante?

There had always been women who pierced through his armour, gaining access and insight to him, to who he was. And yes, Diana was one of them. He lived in the dark, breathed it into his soul; that didn’t mean he couldn’t admire the light, nor love those who lived in it.

He knew better than to expect anything in return. That was not the way life - the way love - worked.

And there were other ways of loving someone than giving them roses.

He yanked back the curtains and looked out over Gotham city. _His_ city.

He gave the best of what he had to Gotham and the League; cleaning up the first - as much as Gotham could be cleaned up - and anchoring the second. It was his knowledge and forethought that balanced out the League’s natural impulsiveness, formed of men and women whose first action was pure instinct, devoid of thought.

That was his ‘love’ and he gave of it freely. The best he had to give of himself, he gave, and kept the parts less salutory to himself.

He would have to take her word that it was just once. Oh, he could spy and watch and be suspicious, but in the end, there were limits to his interference. He could not police them - policing them would serve no purpose other than to drive a wedge between them. Besides, all he would have to do was find her reluctant to use the lasso, or no longer carry it with her, and he would know. Out of mind and out of conscience.

What would it do to the League?

Everything. And nothing.

Bruce scrubbed a hand through his hair. The others accepted Clark and Diana’s closeness; although there were occasionally glances askance. If not for Lois, most of them would never have batted an eyelash. Lois, however, complicated the situation.

Poor Lois. It was hell being the fly in everyone’s ointment.

Bruce knew how that felt.

Self-control was the heart of it. Feeling, but not acting on it. Letting emotion wash over you in a thunderous crash of wave, then standing up in the debris and _thinking_ instead of simply reacting.

Too many people - metas included - let their emotions control them.

Batman did not.

How the hell was this going to work?

He had to take her word that she wanted it over. Because if she didn’t, then all that would happen was that Bruce would become complicit in their affair, a subtle approver and bystander, and one more person caught up in this tangled web. He didn’t want that: for Lois’ sake as well as his.

Would Clark tell her? He doubted it. Not right now. Not ever if he could get away with it.

It was not that the other man was deceitful; not intentionally. But Batman had been around metas long enough to know that even immortals were not immune to self-deception.

And it wasn’t Clark on his doorstep, confessing, either. That said a lot.

No, Superman would keep his secret for as long as he could hold it; guilty as hell, yes, but also convinced that it was ‘just once’ and there was ‘no harm’ as long as they could keep it quiet. And he would fail to see the circumstances that had led to the affair. Perhaps not willfully, but deliberately nevertheless. He would continue with Diana as they had been going on: not understanding that circumstances had led to the affair as much as - if not more than - the will and desire for an affair in the first place.

If Diana really meant what she said, that she wanted back her emotional self-control, then he could work with her. She would argue some of the way, but the lasso would hold her to the truth. And yes, some of it would be in the spirit of jealousy, wanting to redress the wrong that he felt had been done to him by them, even if there was no actual wrong in law or fact.

Yes, he loved her. And yes, he avoided her.

Unlike Clark, Bruce had no illusions about his ability to resist her natural charm. She drew men to her, unintentionally, moths to her flame, and they all singed their wings on her. No fault to the candle that it was her nature to glow, no blame to the moths that it was their nature to home in on her.

So he kept his distance. He sparred with her, but fuelled any desire into his passion of work; he fought beside her, but was careful not to stand too close; he loved her, but knew he had another woman to whom he owed first allegiance - Gotham - and Gotham’s need for the Bat was far greater than his desire for Diana.

He didn’t want to help her. If she’d bound the lasso about his wrist and asked him about his willingness to make things right, he’d have told her to go to hell.

She had asked him for help. Was it wrong of him to be tempted to refuse?

“Master Bruce?” Alfred had found him standing at the window, half-naked, staring out into the night. “You do realise that if you catch cold, I will not be pleased at having to wait on you hand and foot.”

There was a chink of china as the tray was set down.

“Unlike you usually do?” Bruce asked dryly, crossing the room and taking a cookie. Alfred had brought up a herbal tea - the old retainer’s attempt to make Bruce relax. Its scent permeated the room, a pleasant peppermint.

“There is a vast difference between doing something for someone because you want to, and doing it because they were foolish enough to wander around without even a robe to keep them warm.” Alfred arched a brow and looked pointedly at the bed robe laid out across the covers.

Bruce put it on with a half-smile. Alfred had the soul of a bully. Then he heard the underlying notes of Alfred’s comment.

_There is a difference between doing something because you want to, and doing it because someone has forced you into the position of doing it._

The difference between choice and conscription.

He’d given them a choice: to continue as they were going and face the consequences; they’d hauled him into conscription, and taken the choice from him.

 _That_ was why he’d been tempted to refuse.

Not that he would. That was the conscription of it: there were pieces to be picked up - so many pieces. And there was one person who didn’t even know that a price was soon to be asked of her. Lois was unaware that her husband had exacted a price of her, to be paid at the point in the future when the knowledge of his infidelity came home to rest.

And it _would_ come home to rest.

Batman was no god or messenger of truth, but he knew some truths. There was nothing hidden that would not eventually be revealed.

Even he could not tell if Lois would bend or break under such knowledge.

“Have some tea, Master Bruce?’

“I can help myself from here,” he said. “Go to bed, Alfred.”

“And will you likewise go to bed, Master Bruce?” The wizened brows arched, a wry inquiry. “Will you sleep?”

“Perchance to dream?” It was strange that it was mostly with Alfred that he could be whimsical, lighthearted. Of course, a darker humour always lurked. “I suppose something _is_ rotten in the state of Denmark.”

He didn’t ask if the butler had heard what had transpired - or even guessed. Alfred knew everything.

“Then is it curséd spite, that Miss Diana expects you to set it right?”

His mouth twisted. All he said was, “Go to bed, Alfred. I’ll sleep. Sooner or later, I’ll sleep.”

“I would like it to be sooner rather than later.”

“We don’t all get what we’d like.”

“No, Master Bruce,” and there was a heavy sigh in Alfred’s voice. “Good night, then.”

Bruce waited until he was reasonably sure that his old friend had gone to bed, then slipped out of the robe and began centering himself. At a time like this, he needed to bind up all his pain and anger. He needed to ground and centre himself in the tactile physicality, augmented by the awareness of his soul and everything that lurked therein.

He could not erase the burdens he kept, could not toss them aside, but he could set them apart and take a moment of peace in the opportunity to move without brutal intent. In this, there was only the pure joy of the body’s physicality and tactility, giving the soul time to rest and reflect.

He listened to his body and cast out all thought of his team-mates and what they’d done. He flexed each muscle, naming them as he went, group by group, stretch by stretch, and cast out all thought of the consequences to their actions. He moved through the still air of his room with a gracefulness that would have surprised everyone who knew him only as Bruce Wayne, but would have shocked nobody who knew him as Batman.

He controlled himself, supplely exerting control over his wayward body. Age was creeping over him, taking its inevitable toll, making weak what had once been strong: humanity’s blessing and curse. What had once been easier - although never easy - was now becoming more difficult.

But his self-control was absolute, and what set him apart from human and meta alike.

She had recognised that, asked him for help to regain her control over her emotions and instincts when it came to Clark.

Control was merely the muscle of the mind; the more it was used, the easier using it became. And it began in the mind, in the will; without the mind’s determination, the body would not be moved. The heart might have the first word, but the will would have the last. The two were not the same.

Did she have the will to hold to what she had declared - to claim back control of her emotions instead of merely reacting? Or was this just a sop to her pride and anger at realising she couldn’t have what she’d thought she could?

He finished up his tai-chi form, centered himself grimly, and smiled.

It was not a pleasant smile.


	3. judgement

He’d known where she’d go the instant she left the Fortress - the moment she evaded his touch after they’d made love.

It was obvious enough. The ties that bound the three of them were not easily severed, and she trusted Bruce as much, if not more, than she trusted Clark.

He had not expected her retreat.

Yes, they had made love. Yes, it had been wrong. He had known that when he went back to Metropolis, back home to Lois who was pacing the floor, arguing with someone on the phone.

The guilt had hit him hard enough that he hadn’t touched his wife that night. That, and he didn’t want to blur the memory of Diana in his arms with Lois. He had many memories of Lois, and he would have others. Diana was just once. He wanted to remember that once.

But Clark hadn’t expected her retreat.

He first noticed it the next morning as she came in to take over monitor duty. She answered his greeting, but not much more, looking preoccupied. He left her to it but came back up to the Watchtower later to see if she wanted some sparring practise.

“Not now,” she said, apologetically. “I have a meeting down in the embassy.”

“Tomorrow?” He was slightly surprised to find how much he looked forward to spending a little time with her. Not doing anything, just talking with her, laughing, making jokes, small things.

“Maybe.” Her smile was magic in his veins. It wasn’t until she was already gone, heading for the transporters with a swift, sure step, that he realised she hadn’t given him a definite answer.

It came to him over the next few days, nothing important, nothing to signify. Just little rejections, adding up one by one.

He realised Diana was putting distance between them the night Lois was out hunting a story for which she didn’t need his help - so she said. Maybe it was a wifely thing, but she’d sensed something change between them, even if she didn’t know what it was. To hell with metahuman senses, Lois’ instincts for trouble could beat them any day.

And Lois was pulling away from Clark, too.

As he stepped out of the transporter and scanned through the Watchtower, he found Batman in the monitor room, standing at her shoulder, one gauntleted hand pointing something out across the cameras.

He’d seen little of Batman in the last two days. Other than one very brief address, the most minor of commentaries on some STAR labs project on which the League should keep an eye, Bruce had been more often in Gotham than about the Watchtower. Nothing unusual there.

The doors pressed open and she turned. He didn’t. “Superman.”

“Batman. Wonder Woman. Anything interesting?”

Diana had tensed, but only briefly. “Kal.”

She was avoiding Bruce’s eye, Clark was interested to note. His presence? Or something else between them?

By contrast, Bruce wasn’t avoiding her, he was simply focusing his attention on the screens. “Depends what you call interesting,” he said dryly. “A few changes to political rosters and a slight increase in activity around two known military troublespots.” A shrug. “Might be nothing.” His voice plainly indicated the implausibility of that option.

“Might just be your paranoia.”

A thin smile tilted Bruce’s mouth, what could be seen of it from this angle before he turned to Diana. “May I have the chair?”

She seceded the chair to him, moving past Clark in the process. The brush of her skin against the thin material of his uniform was electric. He felt desire crawl over him, reminding him of the last time they’d been in such proximity to each other.

She met his gaze, blue eyes to blue eyes, and he knew she felt the pull of attraction as well.

Batman was already pulling up data screens, oblivious to his team-mates behind him. “The saying goes that it’s not paranoia if they really are out to get you.”

His words fell into the tension like a batarang slicing through the cords of a marionette. A reminder that his so-called ‘paranoia’ about them had paid off. They had laughed at his caution - and then proved him right.

Diana moved away from Clark, then, without haste or reluctance, to stand on Batman’s other side. “So, _are_ they out to get us?” There was a hint of amusement in her voice, and she flickered a glance at Clark, sharing the joke with him over Batman’s head.

“Too early to tell,” Batman muttered. His fingers pulled up a new window and he began pulling out data. “I’ll let you know if anything turns up.”

And, that simply, they were dismissed.

They walked out of the monitor room in step, an subconscious matching of walks.

“You’re not usually up on the Watchtower at this hour.”

“I came to see you.”

Her expression was not exactly pleased, more distressed. “I don’t know if that’s such a good idea, Kal.”

“It happened once. I doesn’t have to happen again.”

She stopped, touching his arm and looking into his eyes. “It was wrong.”

He knew that. He felt it every time he looked at Lois in the last couple of days, thought about making love to his wife - then thought about Diana in his arms. “It won’t happen again,” he said. “That doesn’t mean we can’t just be friends.”

Indecision briefly wavered on her face, before it set, smooth as stone and just as cool. “What did you want to do?”

“Just sparring,” he said. “Training sessions up in the training rooms. We haven’t sparred for a few days now.”

For pure strength, there was nobody who could match her. Nor was there anything to match the pure pleasure of tactile contact with a beautiful woman. It didn’t go further than that, of course, not usually. The Fortress had been an exception.

She shook her head. “Not tonight, Kal.” He was minded of the old joke, and wondered whether she’d claim a headache. The irony of it was like a bar of kryptonite in the gut. “I have an appointment to keep with a young woman who needs training in a new discipline.”

“Tomorrow, then?” He was feeling the loss of her - the absence of her presence in his life. She was pulling away from him, slowly and surely, and he resented it and who he suspected was driving it.

_Damn you, Bruce. You have to play the moral police in this as well? Don’t you trust us?_

She hesitated. “I’m on the tower from four until six, then I have a dinner to go to. We can train then.”

It wasn’t as much as he’d hoped for, but it was enough. “Tomorrow then.”

Her smile was brilliant, then she walked briskly away.

Clark went back up to the monitor room. He had a few things to say to Bruce.

“Back already?” The other man’s voice was mild, but Clark could hear the mockery in it.

“Stay out of this, Batman,” he warned. “My relationship with Diana has nothing to do with you.”

“It has everything to do with me,” Bruce said, his fingers still flashing over the keyboard without pause. “Since she came to me and asked my help.”

It wasn’t meant the way it sounded, set out in the flat, bald tones of the Bat, echoing through the cavernous monitor room.

“Asked your help to what? Forget me?”

Now the mask turned, moving just enough to regard the man who stood just out of his line of peripheral vision. With Bruce, it was necessary to play on his paranoia. Standing just out of sight was one thing that the Batman hated. He preferred to be the one coming unexpectedly upon his enemies, not the one being surprised.

“Hardly. She asked for help in a personal matter, and since it impinged upon Justice League business, I agreed to assist.”

“And exactly what does this ‘assistance’ entail?” His mind could pull up everything from sex, to a ‘how to successfully ignore Superman’ - and none of it pleased him.

“Maybe you should ask her.” Batman turned back and continued typing as if Superman was of no notice.

“Is it because you’re jealous of Diana and me? Because you can’t have her?”

He got the slightest of reactions from that. The typing slowed for just a second, as though the sequence of letters had temporarily eluded the mind. Then it continued, faster than ever and the dark voice rang out, clear and cold in the empty room. “Do not ever assume that any assistance I give Wonder Woman is because I am jealous of the relationship between you and her, Superman.”

He knew of Bruce’s attraction to Diana, just as he knew of her attraction to Bruce.

She made no pretense of it, and Clark knew she had, at one time, attempted to pursue the possibilities between her and their team-mate. That the attempt had been rebuffed - gently, for all that it was Batman they were talking about - was obvious enough; that she had merely set aside her interest in him for the time being was also obvious enough - at least to Clark.

Clark had been careful never to think of what the outcome might be if Bruce ever got over his hangups with intimacy among fellow League members instead of the women who usually took an interest in him, and actually returned to Diana what she had offered, openly and without shame.

The thought of Diana in Bruce’s bed revolted him.

All the more now that he knew the feel and taste and touch of her against him.

The thought of that night - too brief - brought a momentary guiltiness. He pushed both thought and guilt away.

“I do have a question, though,” Batman said, and he leaned back in his chair and swivelled to face Clark, looking up at the man who stood on thin air while Bruce kept himself firmly in the hover-chair. He sounded detached, like a philosopher studying an idea that had no personal bearing on him. “Was the affair an aberration, Clark, or do you intend to continue it?”

The use of Clark’s ‘real’ name stung; it made it somehow more personal than just ‘Superman’ - driving through the Man of Steel to the man who was a reporter, a husband, and also just happened to be Superman as well.

“What do you think, _Bruce_?” He gave back that which he’d been given. The outpouring of scorn was a satisfaction he hadn’t lately felt. “Do you need to know so you can put Protocols for this in place?”

Undaunted by the jeer, Batman steepled his fingers before him. “I’d like to know if can I expect to come home from patrol in the future, and find her sitting in the drawing room on another guilt trip.”

 _Guilt trip._ The words denoted more than just a momentary guilt. Clark felt himself go rigid with anger and disbelief at Bruce’s collossal gall. That he could _dare_ imply that Clark would--

“It was just once.” He spat the words out like bullets. “What do you think I am, Batman? I love Lois.”

“You also love Diana,” Batman returned, and although the jaw hardened slightly, the man beneath the mask was a man of steel will, even as Clark was a man of steel body. “And your ‘loving Lois’ didn’t stop you the other night.”

He had no answer to that.

It had just happened so fast. One moment, he and Diana were laughing and sparring, and the next they were kissing. One thing led to another and neither of them had wanted to stop until...

He dragged his mind from the memory with some effort as Batman spoke again.

“What will you tell Lois?”

Clark tensed. It was one thing to make this about Diana. At least, with Diana, Batman could tenuously claim that it was League business. In fact, Clark was surprised that Bruce hadn’t already spoken of operational disadvantages inherent in team-mates sleeping together - or something like that.

Lois, however, was another matter - and one in which Batman had no say.

“That,” he said, softly, “is none of your business.”

Bruce was inexorable. “Yes or no?”

He didn’t have to answer this. He didn’t have to sit through a lecture from Batman telling him what he should or should not do. Instead, he repeated what he’d said before. “Keep your bat-nose firmly in your own business, Bruce. Stick with the League and Gotham - leave Diana and I out of it.”

With that he strode for the door, furious: at Bruce for asking questions Clark didn’t want to answer, at himself for letting Bruce needle him, at Diana for going to Bruce in the first place.

They could have worked it out between them - no need to bring a third party into this - especially not _him_.

And of course, Bruce couldn’t resist having the last word.

“Infidelity is not always about skin on skin, Clark.” Batman’s voice rang out as he reached the door. Inflexible. Judgemental. “You might like to think about that.”

Clark didn’t answer. He just stalked out the door.


	4. understanding

The only thing that kept her coming to Gotham was the fact that he never changed the codes on the transporter she used. A small thing in which to take comfort, but it was precious as treasure.

It was disturbing to realise that she was using his city as an outlet for all the negative emotions her affair with Kal had stirred up.

Almost as disturbing as the realisation that she was avoiding Kal.

It was unthinkable, and she hated it. But until she could trust herself - and him - she didn’t dare.

They had discussed it, briefly, after the sparring session she’d promised - with J’onn as their witness. Their team-mate acquiesced with no indication that he knew of the reasons behind the request, and if Kal was surprised to see that she had brought someone else along as insurance, he didn’t show it.

The sparring had left her with the indeliable tension that it was not yet safe to be alone with him. J’onn’s presence only partly inhibited them, and she felt the tug of attraction too fiercely to be resisted alone.

She’d stated her desire for space afterwards, as they walked through the Watchtower corridors.

“ _What we did was wrong_ ,” she said quietly.

“ _I’ve thought about it_ ,” he returned, just as quietly. “ _And it won’t happen again. That doesn’t mean we can’t be friends_.”

It was such a tempting offer. ‘Just friends.’ So safe and reassuring, with no harm intended. Surely that was enough?

_Avoid situations that will get you into trouble. Stay out of temptation’s way._

She didn’t need Bruce’s voice in her mind to tell her that staying out of temptation’s way did not involve hands-on grappling with Kal. Her conscience pricked her hard enough with the knowledge that being ‘just friends’ had gotten them into trouble in the first place.

She was not yet so sure of her self-control over her emotions that she could trust her resistance to him. And she was not yet so sure of his determination to be ‘just friends’ that she was willing to risk another burning.

He had not told Lois.

Diana had not asked, but she knew without his needing to say that he had not told Lois. She knew without Bruce needing to tell her that Lois would someday find out. The woman was an investigative reporter with a nose for trouble, she would find out. And when she did...

She had never intended that Lois should be hurt.

Now, Kal was angry with her. She could feel it every time they spoke, in the cool distance of her words to him, of his words to her. He didn’t understand her distance, and resented that she took care to keep it that way.

Or maybe he just resented what he saw as Bruce’s influence over her growing steadily as the days moved on.

No small part of that was her nightly visits to Gotham.

The first night, he had already been gone, and she’d been greeted by Alfred who put a call through to Bruce.

“ _Master Bruce, I believe Miss Diana is here--_ “

“ _I have no time for babysitting. Tell her to go home_.”

And that was it.

At that moment, she came closer to sending a distress signal to Kal and flying for the Fortress than she ever had since that night.

Only Alfred’s intervention stopped her.

“ _If you will excuse my boldness, Miss Diana, I believe I have a course of action for you to take_.”

He produced a bodysuit - matt black, sleek, and exactly her size. It fitted like a second suit. There was a belt, of course, dark grey, almost black, with various pockets and a hook for the lasso. “ _The lasso may be a little ostentatious_ ,” he said, “ _However, unless you are willing to leave it behind_...”

She left it behind, and with it, a large part of the woman who was Wonder Woman.

With a mask over her eyes, and her hair bound back by a ponytail, she was no longer Wonder Woman or Diana.

“ _Hecate_ ,” Alfred pronounced, standing back after smoothing back a tendril of hair. “ _Sometime goddess of the moon, the hunt, the night, and patron of witches and midwives._ ” He eyed her. “ _I trust that any skills at the last should not be necessary this evening._ ”

She’d laughed, then, and gone out after Batman.

That Hecate was also considered the dark side of the goddess Diana, after whom she was named, neither she nor Alfred mentioned. They both knew it. It needed no saying.

And indeed, it was Hecate, not Diana, who sallied forth into the streets of Gotham.

He had been displeased that first night, but she had followed him through the city and seen his craft with new eyes. Merely human, yes; but so much more than even the metas dreamed of being.

At the end of that night, returning to the Batcave in the passenger seat of the silent Batmobile, Diana learned how to put her entry into the computer banks under her own codename, and got a glimpse of the depth and reach of her team-mate’s obsession with the city he called his own.

He gave her no praise for her work. No kind words. She learned that was his way with all whom he trained and taught. Over the next two nights, they emerged from his shadows and she put faces - or, at least, voices - to the names of those of whom she had heard during her time in the League: Nightwing, Robin, Batgirl, Oracle.

At first, she was disgusted by the lack of appreciation he showed to those whom he trained and taught. It wasn’t until she inquired after Robin’s enthusiasm one night that she realised that his repayment might come in other coin. “ _I’ve never done this before,_ ” Robin said, clearly eager for this work. There was no shame in his inexperience of tonight’s effort, only the eagerness and a determination to do it right.

“ _Why not_?”

“ _He’s never trusted me with it before_.”

Those few words and the manner with which they were spoken told Diana much. Batman repaid his associates in trust, not in words or praise or kind touches, but in the care and deliverance of his city.

And, at the end of the night, he saw off the others, took her back to the Batcave, taught her how to perform another task on the computer to add to the ones from the previous nights, and either saw her to the transporter tubes or let Alfred show her to a room.

He avoided her. Carefully and fastidiously, with all the care of someone for whom contact with her would be fatal. Perhaps, in his mind, it would be; Diana couldn’t tell.

And when she asked further about learning to control herself, he regarded her with a maddening stare and coldly asked, “ _Aren’t you being challenged enough_?” And the next task he set her would stretch her just a little further, a little harder.

It was three nights in before she realised that she didn’t have to go on the patrols, that he didn’t require her there. If she came, her presence was factored into the plan, but his attitude seemed indifferent either way.

She kept coming back.

Because of him - him and his family. More than the League, these people were _his_ ; they belonged to him and he to them. They accepted him as he accepted them: a vow of honour that was renewed every night.

They were better than metas, for all that her strength could have taken on any one of them, for all that they could not dodge bullets, nor heal so easily. They began with their humanity and ended with it, too; they mastered themselves, utilised their strengths and took measures to mitigate their weaknesses, and didn’t merely rely on what fate had given them, but maximised it to the fullest of their capabilities.

And those, as she observed, were very full indeed.

It was a true warrior’s caste; passion, drive, dedication, discipline, and a martial comradeship; even the disembodied voice that hissed, resonated, grumbled, or shrilled in their ears as they worked - Oracle - was a part of that caste. Diana wasn’t.

She was included, but she did not belong: and for the first time, she had an inkling of how Batman felt among the League. How he did not feel among his ‘clan’.

They were human, all of them; human, mortal, weak and fragile. But they followed him, took their blows, climbed back to their feet at the end of the night, and accepted a hand up and his trust, if not his praise.

Things were not perfect between them. It wasn’t a happy family. But it was a human one.

Her League monitoring duties were not always conversant with the night patrols in Gotham, but she juggled her responsibilities to League and embassy with the careful delicacy of a diplomat, and nobody complained of her reneging on her duties. Not even Kal.

Nearly a week after she first went to Bruce for help, a League crisis required their presence. It was sorted out swiftly, but tensions were high among the group. The others had not been insensible to the undercurrents between her and Kal, Kal and Bruce, Bruce and her, although not even Wally had dared to ask questions.

They were sitting down to the last debriefing rundown when Batman got the call.

She knew Oracle had called him from the shift in the angle of his cowl just as J’onn was finishing up the meeting. A moment later he rose, drawing all eyes. “I’m needed in Gotham. J’onn, keep me informed if anything comes up regarding the Sinterbloc.”

He was moving, even before he finished speaking.

Diana looked up at him as he passed by. “Do you require my assistance?”

She ignored Kal’s sudden tension, and the surprise of the others. Her concentration was on the man who paused in his step as though she’d surprised him, then said, quite deliberately, “It would be appreciated.”

With a glance at the rest of the League to apologise for her hasty exit, Diana followed after Bruce. There was no mistaking the harsh jealousy in Kal’s eyes, nor the mutinous set of his lips, but it didn’t deter her. He had no rule in her life - they were friends, by his own declaration. Besides, after her work in Gotham over the last two weeks, she had a part in this, too - and she suspected she knew what had happened in Gotham to cause his precipitous departure.

The closed doors couldn’t quite shut out Flash’s comment of, “So how long have those two been...?”

Thankfully, Bruce was probably too far ahead to hear. Probably.

It was less than fifteen minutes later that they landed on the roof of the building where they’d traced the headquarters of a paedophilia ring. He’d agreed to let her fly them in. She suspected it was only because it was quicker: there was nowhere nearby in which to park the Batmobile.

“Oracle, report.”

The accented female voice was a new scrambler program and it took a moment to get the rhythm of the words. She saw his mouth thin as he heard it, although it could have been the news that Oracle was passing to them, succinct and simple.

A paedophilia ring, taking children from off the streets and vanishing them without a trace. Rumours of something dark in the deep underworld of Gotham’s streets, and no hint of what it was. And finally, tonight, a contact from a brothel madam with a lead on the ring.

“Robin did the pickup. Regular checks ran tight. Short, sweet and to the point. She has the location, and we have the links halfway up the chain, just not who’s at the top of it.”

They discovered who was at the top of it when they got in - eeled in through a ventilation system, to interrupt a man with a girl who would have been no more than ten - if that. Batgirl disposed of him with silent precision and nothing louder than the bump as his body hit the floor.

As the others moved to the door, ready to emerge and face what was beyond, Diana paused by the bed of the child, intending to reassure her. It wasn’t even a conscious compassion, only the need to give the child a spark of hope.

The tiny blond girl watched her with eyes empty of trust or innocence. All that could be seen in the sloe-dark eyes was terror, and it froze Diana’s tongue in her mouth.

A shadow moved past her, Robin, slender and colourful in his uniform, moving past Diana and drawing the covers up over the girl’s fragile, naked body. One hand touched the child’s shoulder and she flinched; he squeezed lightly, glanced at Diana, and moved to the door where the others had convened.

After a moment, she followed them, too.

Her inability to offer even the slightest comfort to the child ignited a terrible fire within her. The rage leached out into her blows, she didn’t hold back quite as much as she had been doing since she began working with him. She killed none, respecting his credo, but bones cracked and muscles bruised as they worked their way down to the basement. There were sideways glances from the others, particularly Robin to Batman, but he said nothing of her viciousness and she was glad of it.

The children were quietly closed into their rooms, either too numbed or too petrified to do anything but huddle under the covers. The lingering traces of their terror on the air only fuelled her fury and rage, and made her body stiff with tension and the need to redress the wrongs that had been performed here out of lust, selfishness and cruelty.

Nightwing caught her on the fourth floor, just before they moved to the third. The others went ahead, leaving a trail of battered and bound bodies behind them. “Your anger is getting the better of you,” he said as she turned. The voice was young and pleasant, but quite serious. He turned to look at her, the handsome lines of his face so different and so much the same as Bruce’s.

Because it was Nightwing and not her team-mate, her voice was not as sharp as it might have otherwise been. “It’s difficult.”

“Yes. But anger is no good if you can’t keep a leash on it. It fuels you. It doesn’t control you.”

_It doesn’t control you._

He’d taught them all control, she realised as they went through the third floor like a whisper of inky darkness. How to let the rage and hatred and loss and grief give them the fuel to keep going, but how not to let it master them. And what worked for rage and hatred also worked for desire and longing: it was all a matter of discipline - and he was a master of discipline.

She was used to acting on instinct; she was _good_ at acting on instinct. But as the others moved through with barely a noise to their actions, she realised that being good at acting on instinct wasn’t enough - not in Gotham where the line between full darkness and delicate twilight was so thin, and had to be walked with absolute precision.

Only the Batman could have done it; only he could have passed that on to others.

The understanding was like a light switched on in a darkened room. Patrolling Gotham required discipline of not only the body, but also the mind and emotion - too many terrible things happened in this city, and Batman, Nightwing, Robin, Batgirl, and Oracle all faced it every night.

He hadn’t spoken of learning self-control; her inclusion in Gotham patrols was all the learning she was going to get, down in the dark, brutal underworld that Wonder Woman would never see but Hecate might.

She understood. At last, she understood.

And as they came down to the first floor, blocked off the escapes, and took the ringleaders prisoner, she understood just how fine was the control of her companions.

No deaths, not here. Their movements were sharp but restrained, only what was necessary to get the job done. Every thug was taken down, every man contained, and when Nightwing gave the ‘all clear’ signal from the front door, Batman made a gesture with his hands and the others all vanished into the offices again.

Diana was relegated to ‘clean-up crew’ - dumping the groaning men in the tiny cell that reeked of urine, sweat, musk, and terror. She caught snatches of their conversation over their commlinks: files and papers, cellphone address lists, computer records.

Batgirl came out just as Diana was getting to the last of them, and hauled up the last man like so much rag-doll.

“Filth,” was what the young woman said as they locked the door on them.

“What will happen to them?”

“Police,” came the succinct reply. “Jail. Justice.” And although Diana couldn’t see the girl’s expression through the solid mask, she could hear the feral hunger in the voice.

Robin explained it a bit later when they were up on the roof, watching as the GCPD dragged out both pimps and abusers and the Department of Youth and Family Services came in to see to the children. Batman was still down in the street, speaking to the Police Commissioner, and the others watched and waited to see the outcome of their night’s work.

“Paedophiles rate lowest in the criminal ranks in jails,” he said tightly. “What they’ll get there is worse than anything we could do to them.”

Diana tried not to stare at him, at the untamed viciousness in his voice. It was a new side she was seeing to him and Batgirl - an older darker side than she’d expected from two that she’d initially thought of as merely children.

Then again, tonight, she was seeing a lot of things with new eyes.

“What did you get from the offices?”

Robin shrugged, “Information. Names, clients, connections - that sort of stuff. These rings are rarely independent - they’ll have people who procured the children and transported them, customers who paid to have this set up, the officials they bribed to overlook this - the whole deal.”

“But the police--?”

“Can’t always trust the police not to have their fingers in the cookie jar,” he said bluntly. “It’s not so bad in Gotham - old Commissioner Gordon was honest that way; but other places...no guarantees. When the law’s in bed with crime, everything goes bad.” He caught her look of horror and shrugged, “Human nature. The dark side of us.”

“Not everyone gives in to it, though.”

“No. And not always forever. But some people do - and those are the ones that we hunt.”

She wondered if they ever faced the idea that they might very well cross over to the dark side at some point - that the hunter might become the hunted - Actaeon to his hounds. Probably. Bruce was nothing if not prepared for all possibilities - witness the League Protocols.

They watched the goings-on in the street a little longer, until Nightwing and Batgirl went to deal with a robbery, and Robin got a call from his dorm-mate - something about clogged drains and sinks. They went after notifying Batman of their departure.

So she was the only one left when he returned to the roof. There was nothing else for her to do but patrol alongside him; besides, at some stage he would have to return to the Batcave, and she was his transportation.

“All done?”

“Yes.” He stared back down at the building for a minute, and although there was little change to his face, she knew that he was stiff with revulsion at the thought of what had happened to the innocents found in that building.

Diana held her tongue, waiting for him to instruct her where and what they were doing next, although she was itching to go out and work off the edges of her anger on something else.

Finally, he turned. “I have a meeting with someone a little way from here.”

“I’ll come.”

He allowed her as far as the roof across the street, but went on alone, while Diana crouched at the ledge and studied the informant.

She was maybe thirty years of age, features carved from ebony, her body lean and curvaceous. It was plain she’d been waiting for a while, her face turned towards the distant sounds of sirens, but she seemed only a little surprised when he landed on the roof beside her.

“Did you get them?”

“Yes.” She could hear them clearly enough, for all that the woman kept her voice down and his voice was low.

“Good.” There was a fierce satisfaction in the husky voice. “The girls reported the cops thick on Twenty-Fourth. I thought that might be you.”

“We had a little to do with it.”

Her mouth quirked, fierce and feral. “I’m sure.”

Her eyes flickered beyond him to Diana, and the large dark eyes glanced her over, noting figure, size, and shape. Not a fighter - she’d seen enough fighters take her measure to know that a warrior’s first summary of anyone was strength, reach, and muscle. A madam, then?

“Breaking in another rookie?”

In spite of the distance, Diana stiffened. It was rare that anyone called her experience and ability into question, and the slight upon her honour stung.

If he felt her flash of anger, all he had for the woman was amusement and chiding. “This one isn’t a rookie.”

The black eyes flickered over Diana again and this time she felt her measure taken and filled. “No, I imagine she isn’t.” One corner of her mouth curved. “Unusual for you to be seen with a woman. The girls were wondering...”

“No.”

In the night, white teeth flashed against dark skin before the woman turned to leave. “Until next time.”

It was interesting that the woman didn’t wait to see him go. Most people tried to watch him disappear. This one simply turned around and let him leave with as much or as little haste as he wished. Very unusual.

“One of your informants?” She asked when they regrouped a few streets away on the terraced garden rooftop of a skyscraper.

“One of them.” He strode to the edge of the building and stared out over it at the streets below, still filled with people moving out and about.

“A madam?”

“Yes.” His cloak flapped out about him, and he glanced at her, inquiringly. “Shocked?”

“Not as much as you might think.”

“Oh?”

She left a long pause before she spoke again, and when she did, it wasn’t to answer his question. “How do you do it?”

The question hung between them, a plaint that had been previously asked, both voiced and unvoiced, but never truly understood before.

She’d known of the horrors of which people were capable, but she had never yet had to face them - not in such raw, stark detail. And he did this every night, time and time again, without cease, without rest, without fail, night after night.

“Self-control,” he said at last. “And practise.”

It was well-known among the League that Batman had a darkness about him that he kept from the others; but she’d never seen how deep it went until tonight. She doubted that even Kal knew just how far the darkness in Bruce went. But she knew that because Bruce faced his demons every night in the guise of Batman, he knew pefectly well how far the darkness went within himself - and the line to which he could push it before he would slip beyond the reach of light.

Perhaps why he never killed.

He held her gaze, inquiringly, and when it became plain to him that she was not going to ask anything more, he spoke. “Oracle? Anything?”

“Quiet night, B. The underworld seems to have gotten the gist of what happened in the red, and is keeping pretty quiet tonight. Other than the robbery that Nightwing and Batgirl sorted out, it’s silent night in Gotham.”

“Have they delivered their information to you?”

“Not yet. On their way now. Robin dropped his off before he went to find a plumber, should I get yours from the Batmobile?”

“Batcomputer.”

“Hecate’s your ride for the night?” Oracle seemed a little surprised.

There was no explicit change in his stance, but Diana had the feeling that he was not pleased by Oracle’s turn of phrase. “Can you have the details of all connected persons by tomorrow night?”

“Please,” Oracle sniffed. “Give me _some_ credit, B.”

“And there’s nothing on the scanners?”

“Even the hookers are complaining it’s a quiet night,” came the reply.

He didn’t seem very pleased by that, either.“Very well, Batman out.”

“Happy flying. Oracle, out.”

Happy flying, it was not. Not exactly.

The flight out had been haste over comfort. The flight back was a different matter. Carrying him in her arms like a baby would put unnecessary strain on her arms - to say nothing of being undignified. Carrying him in front of her, with her arms around his chest put unnecessary strain on his shoulders, and his legs still dangled down. And it was still mildly undignified when they were talking a long distance.

However, carrying him on her back was, if dignified, not exactly comfortable - at least for her. He was taller than she by perhaps an inch, and that meant that she had the full warm length of a man lying along her back all the way back to the Manor.

It could have been worse, she told herself. If she’d been wearing her usual costume, then there would have been only his body armour along her arms, legs, and back, separating them. He was warm, and heavy for a human, and the rhythm of his heart against her back was a comforting beat.

Her mind treacherously cast up the memory of Kal’s heart thundering against her breast, his mouth on her throat...

She put the thought carefully away. Dwelling on it did her no good. He wasn’t hers, it wasn’t right. And the memory of the lasso’s incandescence against her thigh was an inhibitor as powerful as Bruce’s scorn that first night.

_You must never deny the truth, Diana. It will cost you, because truth always does; but it will return to you other things. Truth and the keeping of it is a reward in and of itself, but the truth will bring you other blessings when you cling to it._

As he shifted a little, adjusting the arm that lay diagonally across her chest, elbow at her waist, hand at her shoulder, she wondered, with a spurt of laughter that was almost hysterical, if this was one of the blessings of the truth.

Somehow, she doubted it.

Bruce wasn’t treating her with any more kindness than he had a week ago. She was still plainly on sufferance and her penance was not complete - not yet.

But she was learning.

They set down in the Batcave, and he slipped off her without so much as a stumble, unwrapping his arms from around her, and leaving her feeling cold.

He crossed over to the Batcomputer immediately and sat down in the chair, a habitual flourish sweeping his cloak out of the way so he could sit comfortably and regard the information that they’d gained tonight. A moment later, the rhythmic tapping of the keys began his report.

And she watched him.

Maybe it was just the fact that there had only been the one bust tonight - that what she’d seen tonight had ignited within her a need to make all wrongs right, and end such cruelty here and now - but she was humming with anticipation. The return flight had only exacerbated that with him lying against her like a lover at her back.

She wondered what happened when he lost that self-control - whether he _had_ lost it in the arms of another woman, or if he moved in a woman’s body with the same absolute precision as he gave to the rest of his life.

She wondered if she’d ever be allowed to find out.

Telling him she loved him had been no lie. Friend and team-mate, confidante, and sometime sparring partner, she loved him - but their kiss at the end of the Obsidian Age had gone nowhere - his choice - and they’d been just friends since. And after last week, she was not even so sure they were friends.

“Put your details in the computer so Oracle can get at them. Will you be staying?”

He’d stood and was indicating the chair. If he wanted her to stay or go, he gave no hint of his preference, and she bit back irritation.

“Yes.”

She liked the room Alfred had assigned to her. Her rooms at the embassy were beautiful and light-filled, simple, yet elegant; but the dark-panelled rooms of Wayne Manor held a history and a mystique that was irresistable.

Rather like their owner.

He walked towards her now, pulling the cowl from his head. “If you start typing at the prompt, it will transmit the file to Oracle when you save it. All details you noticed, anything out of the ordinary, even observations on the children and what abuses were used on them.”

She couldn’t help the grimace. Her stomach turned at the thought of reliving the horror of those moments - the girl tied down to the bed before Nightwing cut through her bonds - and he saw it.

His gauntlet caught her arm. “This is important, Diana. Put your feelings away and deal with the facts. It’ll help those children more than all the outrage in the world.”

And, for the first time in what seemed like a long time, there was something akin to kindness in his expression.

They were close enough for her to feel the warmth emanating from him - human warmth radiating through his armour and her bodysuit. She could see the flecks of grey in his eyes, the sweat-damped sheen against his skull, the fine-skinned plane of cheek and chin; suave and sleek with the playboy’s full-lipped mouth.

It went deeper than mere handsomeness; through skin and flesh and blood and bone to the core of what made Bruce Wayne, Batman. The ravening torment of his history, the fierce hunger of his dedication to an ideal no less worthy than her own ideas of peace and prosperity - just at a smaller level, the drive to be the most of which he could make himself...

He was a magnet. Only human. Only mortal, but the gods had never gifted one such as this. He had made of himself what he was, without the aids of gods or powers that were. And the totality of him was nothing less than a work of art - truly a self-made man.

The urge to caress his hair was almost unbearable, to draw his mouth down to hers and feel him on her lips as she’d felt him against her back on the flight back to the cave.

She’d already half-reached out to him before a memory flashed clear across her mind.

She’d reached out to touch Kal’s face in a moment of tenderness as they lay on the floor after sparring. That action had ultimately landed her here, struggling to remember that there were some instincts it was better not to obey.

_Self-control._

Her hand retracted, closing into a fist and she turned away. And one or both of them might have sighed, but his were definitely the words that reached her ears as she sat down at the console and began savagely typing away.

“Well done, princess.”


	5. complication

He jerked off in the shower and stood under the hot spray feeling both limp and tense.

Tonight’s awareness of her had certainly not begun with the flight back to the Batcave, or even the flight out. It had been present even as she turned to him in the League meeting room and asked if he required her assistance in Gotham.

Pure instinct had almost made him say no, before he realised that her work in the last few nights entitled her to see just a little of what she had been working towards. It wasn’t until they’d landed on the roof of the building that he realised that breaking the paedophile ring would be an education in the darkness of the human soul - and a lesson in controlling emotion-fuelled actions.

Nightwing’s soft advice to her had been timely. Too much more and Bruce had been going to have a word with her himself. As it was, she’d leashed her fury from the younger man out of politeness: she would have done no such thing for him.

But he knew where she was and it wasn’t a nice place. He’d stood there himself, trying to cope with the horror of the human soul and desperately afraid that it would overwhelm him. A man could only stare into the darkness for so long before he had to die, or become it. And that was the fine line of control he walked, perhaps not every night, but with a regularity that would have left any of his team-mates in the League trembling.

The switch had flipped tonight for her; he’d seen it as they swept through the second floor, taking out the monsters who masqueraded as men one by one. As she’d lashed out at her opponents, the finesse of her blows, powered by righteous anger but ruled by her will, had shown that she finally understood the reasons for her presence here in Gotham. Not the request she’d made of him to develop her self-control around Clark, but the underlying problem that had caused it.

They all had darkness in them; old and young, male and female, human and meta. Even Wonder Woman held some measure of darkness in her soul, although her lasso kept her honest. The difference between man and animal, citizen and criminal, right and wrong was nothing more than a degree of control.

Playing with fire burned, and fighting the darkness changed a man. And the longer you played with fire or fought the darkness, the harder you had to hold onto your control.

Bruce knew that very well.

He let the water sluice over his face and down his throat, dripping from shoulder to chest to groin to thigh. He scrubbed himself down, rinsing through his hair as he considered how much they’d found on this operation. Someone on the GCPD payroll was probably dirty, someone on the licensing division of Gotham city council almost certainly was. Hopefully, what they had here would help the police to trace who it was - and maybe finger them and their cronies. One more avenue cut off - at least temporarily - and a number of children who might someday understand that they didn’t need to live in fear.

Unlikely, perhaps, but hope was eternal - even for Batman.

That would be more work for tomorrow and tomorrow night, anyway.

He dried off, and dressed in slacks and a shirt, rubbing his hair dry with a towel as he went back out into the cave.

She was still at the computer, typing away with dogged intensity, and he simply leaned against the door and watched her for a moment.

She’d hauled off the mask and dumped it beside her, and the reflected glow of the computer screen highlighted brow and nose, cheekbones and chin, and slunk along the lines of throat, shoulders, and breasts.

Dangerous. Beautiful and dangerous in the purity of her righteous anger over the children, in her palpable grief and longing to make it all _right_. She flew through the sky - a being of power and awe and wonder - and lesser mortals watched from the ground and longed to be her. But her world of embassies, speeches, relief aid, and heroism was so far from the dirty grey of the streets below that she’d had little comprehension of the depths to which mere humanity could sink.

Oh, she’d known, but she hadn’t _known._ Not until tonight.

Yes, he loved her. He lived in the darkness and yearned for the light - nothing strange about that, it was the destiny of all humanity to hope for something better.

At least she’d learned something out of tonight and all the previous nights. He’d been proud of her restraint, but also regretful of it. And, ultimately, he’d been relieved she drew back. If she’d touched him then, Bruce wasn’t so sure he could have vouched for even his own self-control.

And that would have been even more damaging to her, him, their relationships with Clark, and the League as a whole than her actions of a week ago. There were too many unfinished things between them all.

She hit a few more keys, then sat back in the chair. “It’s all in,” she said, and her voice held a semblance of calm at least.

“Take a shower,” he said, levering himself off the doorframe to the clean-up room, unsurprised at her awareness of his presence.

She passed within inches of him, and turned to face him, one hand reaching out to catch his arm. “Bruce...”

They heard the door at the top of the stairs open. “Master Bruce?”

He wasn’t sure if he was glad or furious for the interruption. “Alfred?”

“You have a guest.”

It was the inflection of the butler’s voice. This was not just a guest, but a very delicate diplomatic matter.

_Clark._

And for all that he’d expected this confrontation sooner or later, he’d expected it up at the Watchtower in what could be termed ‘neutral ground’ - not down here at Wayne Manor. Still, he was prepared.

He was _always_ prepared.

“We’ll be right up, Alfred.”

Alfred coughed, the soul of politeness. “I would suggest that you see Ms Lane _alone_ , Master Bruce.” There was a wealth of meaning in Alfred’s voice. “She is waiting for you in the drawing room.”

_Lois._

He felt Diana freeze, the guilt washing off her in waves.

Suddenly desire came brutally second to the wave of anger and frustration he’d felt that first night when he’d chided her for betraying Lois. Except this time, it was doubled, because of all the people Lois Lane could have gone to for help at this time, she’d come to _him_.

And Bruce could just imagine what Clark was going to make of that.

He left her standing in the Batcave without a second glance, and went to Lois.

\--

The first thing he saw as he entered the room were the bruises.

Dressed in a scoop-necked t-shirt and jeans, the bruises were obvious on the pale skin of her arms and throat. The indents of fingers marked her upper arms, the thumbs plain to be seen on the biceps. The smears across her throat were less distinct, but there and there - teethmarks?

Cold, icy rage rose in him as he looked at her and she looked back at him. Then he squashed his first immediate, furious thought. Clark wouldn’t do that. Hero, superhuman, betrayer, and adulterer, yes; abuser, no.

Lois met his gaze and he grasped the truth of the bruises, even as she spoke. “We were...” She flushed. “He was more fierce than usual - and I didn’t think until after... Until I realised that the last time he’d...” Slowly, her arms lifted out from her body. An appealing gesture, and a hopeless one. “She doesn’t bruise like this, does she?”

No. She didn’t bruise like that.

Bruce took a step towards her, and as though it had been a signal, she came to him and sought human comfort from someone she trusted.

He put his arms around her as she broke down. And trembled when she wrapped her arms back around him. He didn’t allow many people close. And not a few of the people who were close had pushed their way close in spite of his attempts to keep them out.

Lois was one of them. And whatever else had or had not happened between them while they dated, he still had a fondness for her, not unabated since her marriage to Clark.

A marriage that was presently in trouble.

There was a gentle knock at the door, and a moment later, Alfred entered with a tray of tea and a box of tissues, both of which he left on the table before silently departing.

“He didn’t even blink an eyelash at the bruises,” she murmured as the door shut behind Alfred.

“He’s discreet.”

That got a choked laugh from her as she pushed herself away from him. “He’d have to be with you as an employer.” She crossed the room and started plucking tissues. “I must look a mess.”

Bruce knew there were some questions that should not be answered in a tone of voice which denoted anything other than wholehearted encouragement of the person asking them. This was one of them.

Instead, he poured tea, all the while with the nagging feeling that Lois would rather have had coffee. Then again, she was wound up enough that coffee would only make things worse.

As if things could be worse.

“He said there was nothing between them,” she said at last, watching him through chestnut lashes. “He _promised_ me there was nothing going on! He stood there with his damn blue eyes and that look like a kicked puppy and _swore_ that it was entirely platonic.”

Bruce handed her the mug. He could feel himself tying into knots just listening to her; and yet he wasn’t the wronged one here. “He might have been telling the truth at the time.”

She realised his lack of surprise a moment later. “How long?”

“Have I known?” He held himself quite still. “A week.” A week of treading carefully around them both, of resisting the urge to increase his monitoring over the Fortress and in the Watchtower, of lying in bed at night and asking why Clark and not him. A week of watching her every night, driving her beyond what she could endure, testing the limits of her self-control, and never knowing whether or not she would break or shatter as he put her through the fire.

She stared at him for a long moment, her eyes not even seeing him. Then, her eyes refocused and she looked at him with all the intensity of the investigative reporter. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

“I don’t carry tales.” Especially not these kinds of tales.

“Is it a boys’ club thing?” Violet eyes sharpened on him, “Or a League club thing?”

His voice was inflexible in the tension, “Neither. Lois--” He knew he was coming across harshly, and gentled his voice for her. “Nobody wants to be the bearer of bad news.”

Lois shuddered. “I knew something had happened, I just didn’t know-- He promised me it would never happen! And now...”

And now she had to live with what her husband had done - to her and himself and Diana and Bruce.

The difficult part for Bruce was that he could see no sign that Clark had any intention of giving up Diana. Not in terms of carrying on a sexual relationship with her, but in terms of throttling back any of their interactions. And Bruce knew that the interactions had been part and parcel of why that night had happened and what had happened. Nothing in relationships ever happened in a vacuum.

“I hate this,” Lois scrunched tissues, and they fell about her feet like hailstones. “I’ll bet _she_ never breaks down.” The statement was almost a question, inviting his confidence. When she got no answer, she added, “Sometimes I wonder why he stays at all. If she’s so...so...”

“Wonderful?”

“I was thinking ‘amazing’,” she said, choking a laugh. “But yeah. Why does he stay with me if he wants her?”

“He wasn’t the one who left tonight,” he pointed out.

That brought another choke from her. “No. But the question still stands.”

He thought back to the argument he’d had with Clark up on the Watchtower, working in the monitor room. Jealous as Clark had been, there had been a truth in his words: he _did_ love Lois. “Maybe he loves you.”

“He cheated on me, Bruce! Is that the act of someone who loves me?” Almost as soon as the outburst was done, she regained her composure - all but the flush. “God, I’m messed up.”

_And if you’re messed up, Lois, then the question begs to be asked: Who did the messing up?_

“All humans are.” He used the term deliberately, knowing that there was something lying beneath the surface, that was hurting - an older wound than Clark’s affair with Diana. He could deduce what it was, knowing Lois, being in the same position himself, and her next words only confirmed it.

“It’s hell being human, Bruce.”

And didn’t they both know it?

But Bruce knew something else, too. He moved around the table in three strides, and knelt down in front of her, cradling her jaw in his hands. Intimate, yes, but without the charged atmosphere of earlier tonight, locking eyes with Diana.

Lois looked back at him from across a bare three inches.

“Don’t.”

She stared back at him, unafraid by his proximity, trusting his restraint. “Don’t what?”

He wasn’t good with words, not really. But he remembered overhearing a conversation between Barbara and Dick, long ago, while Nightwing was recovering from an injury. “They do something to us,” he said quietly. “The metas. They twist our brains so we can’t think straight - so we don’t see straight.”

Her eyes were a deep blue, in the firelight they were lambent violet. “What do you mean?”

“We think of ourselves as freaks. As not good enough. Because of them.”

Dark lashes fluttered down and she nodded. “Inferior,” she said, and he saw the gleam of tears beneath the darkness, spilling down over her cheeks. No, she was no Diana. But she was wholly, beautifully human - and at this moment, that was more precious to him than a thousand Amazons.

“You’re not inferior to her, Lois. Different, but nothing less.”

“Is that what you tell yourself?” She asked. “How do you stand it?”

He wasn’t sure himself. “It’s a job to do,” he said, offering her a handkerchief Alfred had no doubt stuffed in his pocket on the way in. “And not everything is about strength and skill,” he said. His value to the League went far beyond strength and skill.

“Cunning plays a part?”

“Something like that,” he murmured and eased himself off his knees and onto the couch beside her, not holding her, just sitting alongside her with his elbows on his knees. She had needed holding before, now she needed someone beside her. And Clark wasn’t here, and wasn’t going to be here anytime soon.

The doorbell rang.

Then again...

She’d jerked up at the sound of it, dread all over her features, and her fingers closed around his wrist. “Don’t leave me, Bruce,” she said lowly. “Please.”

He appreciated what the plea had cost: this was Lois, after all. Independent, determined, and ballsy enough for a whole platoon of metas. But the sight of Lois attached to Bruce like a limpet was going to do nothing for Clark’s state of mind. Not after their spat out in space, with Clark accusing Bruce of jealousy and Bruce asking all the questions neither man wanted voiced.

He hoped to heaven above and hades below that Diana was going to keep herself well out of this confrontation. That would be all he needed, the three of them going at each other.

As Clark was shown into the room by a calm-eyed Alfred, Lois’ nails dug gently into Bruce’s wrist. It was the barest of pressures, but Clark’s eyes flickered down at the slight flex of movement, then up to his wife’s face.

She wasn’t meeting his gaze, fussing, instead, with a tissue in her lap.

Bruce did meet Clark’s gaze, and the intensity of resentment there was like a volcano quietly bubbling beneath the surface. For Diana, for Lois, for things that had lain between them longer than either man suspected and were only now coming to the forefront with this conflict. Sooner or later, it would blow, and heaven help anyone in the vicinity.

“Mr. Wayne.” The voice was that of the mild-mannered reporter, but there was a steel reminiscent of his alter-ego as he spoke. “Lois.”

“Which part of the phrase, ‘I need some space’ didn’t you understand, Clark?”

Trust Lois to take the offensive. She knew her man well - as either Superman or Clark Kent.

The question running through Bruce’s mind was just how much sanity Clark was presently running on. He’d been slowly tilting off-balance more and more since that night. Diana’s withdrawl had begun it, and Bruce’s part in that wasn’t making anything better. Lois’ flight - to Bruce, of all people - was going to upset the scales completely.

And for Bruce, the most terrifying part was that he had only the vaguest of ideas of what was going to come out of it.

For a moment, he wished he had the kryptonite ring with him. Just as insurance.

“When you said ‘space’, I didn’t think you meant driving two hundred miles to come _here_.” Cords stood out along the line of the throat, and his eyes were fixed firmly on his wife - who still had her fingernails quite firmly in Bruce’s arm.

“I didn’t have to drive two hundred miles,” she countered. “more like eighty. I caught the ferry at Dover Point.”

Which wasn’t changing a thing. Clark’s anger had nothing to do with _how far_ she’d come and everything to do with _to whom_ she’d come.

“That’s not the point.”

“No, it’s not. The point is that I said I wanted space and you can’t seem to accept that!”

“I said I was sorry!”

“And you think that makes a difference? God, Clark, what planet _have_ you been living on all these years?”

_The Planet of Clueless Husbands._

Bruce didn’t say anything. This was between them. He might have preferred to be somewhere else, but Lois wasn’t going to let him leave, and there was no way he was going to be able to extricate himself without making a scene. At least, making any more of scene than was already being made.

Somewhere, deep inside, there was a bubble of black humour, waiting to get out. As Bruce Wayne the playboy, he’d allegedly screwed around with more women than most men had eaten hot dinners. Ironic that the one time he did have a jealous husband turn up on his doorstep would be when the _husband_ was the one to have had the affair.

Someone had to be getting a laugh out of it, anyway. Bruce wasn’t.

He was getting a headache.

Clark was reasonable. For Clark. “Look, Lois, just come home.”

She shook her head. “No.”

Bruce knew what her next words would be and forced himself not to tense. He had to behave as though they’d already discussed this, without any indication that it had come as a surprise - and an unwelcome one at that. Usually, Clark would be able to study and judge his reactions; right now, Clark was completely focused on his errant wife.

His errant, _determined_ wife.

“I’m staying here tonight.” Lois said, and although there was a catch in her voice, she was resolute.

Clark went very still - a dangerous stillness that both of them recognised. They were too conversant with his habits not to be aware of the tenuous thread that held him back. He was angry - so angry that only two courses of action existed - either to stalk away or punch something very hard.

Bruce was careful not to shift into a defensive stance beside Lois. The intimation that she needed protection from Clark would trigger his rage as surely as kissing her would. He held his ground, stuck to his station, and waited.

They’d judged him right - at least for the moment. The anger faded.

“We need to talk,” Clark said. Quietly now, to Lois, with the familiar, slightly puppy-dog look that she’d spoken of before.

“Yes,” she said, and lifted her chin. “But not here and not now. Go home, Clark. Just go home and get out of my sight.” Her last words were tossed carelessly, but they struck him like Kryptonite bullets. In the end, the part of Superman that was most fragile was his emotions: as human as the parents who’d brought him up.

“Lois...”

“Just. Go.”

At that moment, Bruce had never seen anyone more regal than Lois. Not even Diana at her most imperious could match this: the quiet distinction, without an Amazon’s instinctive pride in her prowess. Lois was hurt, human, humiliated, and tired, but at this moment she was beautiful with the simple dignity of a woman who was climbing to her feet after taking an emotional hit.

No superpowers, no amazing skills, with tears streaking her face and reddening her eyes, and her heart battered and bruised, but Bruce looked at her and felt pride and satisfaction and, yes, _love_ for her and the strength she showed.

Clark was not immune to it. He loved both women - Bruce could give him that - but Lois held him fast to her with her humanity, even as Diana tugged him to her in her inhumanity. He was both human and not, and the two women represented his polarities; what he could have and could not have, what he could be and could not be.

And Bruce could pity him for the dichotomy.

He said nothing as Clark turned and went to the french doors, pushing them open without a word and striding to the edge of the balcony before lifting off without a backwards glance.

They stood silent and still for a long while, waiting for him to gain distance on them. Then Lois shivered with an all-over sobbing body-sigh. “I love him.”

“I know.”

“It hurts.”

He felt the answering ache in his own chest - a loss of something he’d never even had with Diana; swiftly squashed. “I know.”

\--

He’d seen Lois to bed.

Not one finger had been laid on her that wasn’t platonic, although he had the feeling that if he’d been in any way willing, she might have slept with him for pure spite.

And he _was_ only human, after all.

He waited until she was asleep before descending to the kitchen to find Alfred washing up the last remnants of a batch of cookies, and Diana sitting at the table with a mug of hot water by her hand.

She looked up as he came in. “How is she?”

He bit back the urge to laugh, and the urge to snarl. It took all his self-control to say in the most level voice he possessed: “Sleeping,” he said.

There was nothing to do but take a chair. She didn’t look like she was going to move anytime soon, and Alfred would have a number of short, pithy things to say if Bruce tried to kick her out at this point.

He sat back without a sigh, too tense for even that relief.

The silence stretched.

Then, she shifted. “I didn’t think of her... When we... It never occurred to me until after that...”

This was not something he wanted to hear. Not now. Not ever. He had no desire to hear any confessions - particularly hers.

Alfred put a mug of coffee - thick, black and bitter - down before him, and Bruce glanced up in thanks. The old man gave him a warning look: tread carefully.

Bruce was beyond treading carefully. After holding Lois in his arms, after facing Clark, after becoming the marriage counsellor in this sorry mess - and he didn’t understand _why_ everyone seemed to think that he was the person to come to - he was so far past ‘treading carefully’ that it wasn’t funny.

So he made his voice quietly ironic as he lifted his mug to his mouth and said, “That’s what selfishness is, Princess. Not thinking about others.”

From the corner of his eye, he saw her stiffen, going rigid in automatic protest. The knowledge that he’d scored a direct hit was as bitter as the coffee that rolled over his tongue.

“Master Bruce--”

The mug was set down on the table, very gently. “Alfred, I’ve just spent the last two hours listening to Lois talk about a betrayal she holds as great as any of the League felt when they found out about my protocols.” He couldn’t keep the clipped anger from his voice, born of hopelessness, compounded by the pain of his own feelings of betrayal and his inability to do anything about the situation. “And I am not the most comforting of people at the best of times, which seems to indicate just how bad things are for her that she felt she had nobody else to go to.”

He knew his body was rigid, knew that his self-control was a bare fingernail away from collapsing entirely. Lois’ fear and horror was too close to his own, carefully hidden emotions. She had a right to them, he did not. And he envied her the release of tears: Bruce Wayne had no tears. Bruce Wayne only had anger and anguish and the endless pain that he transmuted into the vengeance of Batman - the only release he’d ever allowed himself.

“The most comforting thing I could tell her that she clung hold of, was that as far as I knew, it was just the once and it would never happen again,” he said. His muscles were taut as he looked at Diana, watching him with guilt-filled blue eyes, and slowly and deliberately added, “And I can’t even vouch that it’s the truth.”

His invocation of the word ‘truth’ bit her. Hard.

Her voice was icy when she spoke again, “I meant what I said. It happened once, and once is all.”

“Easy to say now,” he told her, meeting her gaze and letting her see his contempt. “You once assured me it would never happen. But the next time there’s a crisis, the next time the heat of battle gets in your veins and his - the next time you’re sparring at the Fortress and there’s nobody about to see - then? Will it be true for every time it ‘happens once’, Diana?”

“Do you question my word?”

“No. Only your self-control around him.”

“And what part of this is related to your jealousy, Bruce?”

She should have known better than to invoke any mention of his feelings for her. Didn’t it occur to her that he’d questioned that himself, night after night, time after time? Didn’t she think he’d ever wondered how much of his objection to the closeness between Clark and Diana was because they shared something he had no part in, and which he longed for, even as he denied it to himself?

“All of it,” he said evenly. “And none of it. As I keep telling you.” His lip curled. “You come to me, asking to learn how to regain control over your emotions, then question my ability to rein in my own? Not exactly a gesture of trust.”

She flushed. “I spoke in anger,” she said, as close to an apology as he was going to get. She was proud, too. Then, as though something else was gnawing at her, she shifted.

He waited.

Alfred finished his washing up, the last swirl of the water glugging down the drain, drawing their attention to the man who knew all their secrets and could be trusted with them all.

“I will be in the accounts room,” Alfred said, addressing Bruce with the unruffled composure that he must have learned somewhere in butlering school. “It would appreciated if you did not hurl anything breakable. Including fists and heads.”

Bruce felt the stirrings of dark amusement within him. He clamped down on it, and gave the barest of grim smiles as he watched the old butler leave, and listened to his footsteps echoing down the hall.

That amusement fled him as he looked back at Diana.

She looked as though she was expecting a deathblow, which was odd. Even when she came to him that first night, after...well, _after_ , she hadn’t looked like this.

He arched a brow and watched her take a deep breath. “What you said about metas - all metas... Did you mean it?”

_They twist our brains so we don’t think straight. So we don’t see straight._

“Yes.” He met her gaze evenly. “I have never dissembled about why I dislike metahumans, Diana. I have never lied. And what you and Clark did is the tiniest example of why.”

“Because we slept together?” Anger blossomed. “Are you afraid of a race of metahumans breeding up to take over the world?”

Her mockery fell flat. “Because you broke the rules.”

“And you never have?” Her scorn poured over him, a cup of wrath that he took without flinching.

“Because you broke the rules in something so small as a personal relationship; because you could break the rules in something so large as the fate of the world.”

That angered her. “You think that Kal and I would ever risk the world for each other?”

“I think that you twist our brains so we don’t see straight,” he said. “Because you’re so high above humanity, and we watch the stars, longing for a way to reach them - and we do. But what asks a price of us comes to you without effort. And human or meta, we value what costs us.”

“You know that it costs us.”

“In some ways, yes. But in others...” He shrugged. “Those who don’t reach the stars look for them in metahuman heroes. And when those heroes fall...”

“‘ _With great power comes great responsibility_ ,’” she said softly.

He snorted at the Spiderman reference. Comics had a lot to answer for.

“We are ‘Earth’s Mightiest Heroes’,” he said calmly. “And no small part of that is because we believe we are. Your affair with a married man - and his with you - casts doubt on that. If it was just the two of you, then nobody would think twice of it.” Except him, perhaps. “But you betrayed _Lois_ , Diana! Not a superhero, just an ordinary human who can’t compete with you in any way!

“You were once the Goddess of Truth - what kind of truth is there in making a lie out of another woman’s love?”

She stared back at him and said nothing; but he could see the guilt and anger and anguish and pain in her eyes when she looked at him.

“Whether or not you meant to, your judgement and his went so far astray in a personal matter that it casts doubt on other matters as well. It’s a corollary of trust: if you can’t be trusted in the small things, how can you be trusted in the big things?”

“Like the League.”

“Like the League.” He scrubbed a hand through his hair, and briefly longed for a universe without superheroes or metas of any and every kind.

Between Diana asking him for help, Clark getting mad at his ‘intervention’, Lois coming to him for reassurance - to say nothing of the recently-completed JLA mission and tonight’s cracking of the paedophile ring, Bruce was tired.

What was more, he was well aware he had an audience to his weariness. And he couldn’t quite afford that.

He looked up, planning to push away from the table and go to bed - and found her watching him.

It wasn’t a wary look, or a calculating one; just a slightly sad gaze.

Still, the sheer presence of what was between them stilled his hand in his hair and stole his breath.

Intoxication was not the word for it, enchanted came close, but whatever it was, a man would give his soul to have her look at him like that - and whatever he threw away would be worth it. If she’d looked at Clark like this that night, then Bruce could not find it in him to be surprised that the other man had thrown his better judgement to the winds.

Bruce could do that too. Very easily, or so his body was saying.

He could, but he wouldn’t.

He wasn’t Clark.

Deliberately, he leaned back in his chair, away from the flame of her eyes and the too-intense emotions fluctuating between them. He made his voice calm, and his expression inflexible.

“Go home, Diana.” He told her, using Lois’ exact same words. And she’d been listening, he realised as she flinched at his words. Which meant that Clark had probably been aware of her presence at the Manor - whatever he thought of it.

He bit back the desire to tell her not to stop by Metropolis on the way home and nearly didn’t manage it.

So his self-control was shot when she came in close by him and brushed her lips past his cheek, a casual caress, nothing of it. “Goodnight, Bruce.”

He heard her footsteps echo down the hallway to the door and held onto his composure by cobwebs.

And Alfred found him sitting, boneless, at the table when he returned from seeing Diana out.

“You seem to have a gift with the ladies, Master Bruce.”

“You seem to have lost your tact for the night.”

“Like master, like butler, I always say,” Alfred murmured.

“So you’re a paranoid vigilante who runs about Gotham in tights and a cape?” Bruce inquired dryly. He couldn’t help it.

“If I were, Master Bruce, this town would not be big enough for the two of us.” And with that, Alfred sailed out to see to the sitting room.

Bruce climbed to his feet and got himself to his room on pure willpower. This whole state of affairs had made an otherwise routine week into hell: physical and emotional.

It wasn’t even finished yet.

There was going to be a reckoning between him and Clark sooner or later. There had to be; things were off-balance between them, and while it hadn’t done any damage in the recent League crisis, after tonight, Clark’s temper would have hit boiling point.

It was more than just Lois, or just Diana. It was more than Bruce’s censure of Clark’s relationship with Diana. It went deeper than those things, back to the old, comfortable competition between them. They’d been brought up human, one with the money, the other with the physical power, like brothers: sunlight and shadow. But they also had all the competitive nature of brothers, too - and the rivalries and little enmities that came with such a bond.

Cain and Abel had been brothers, once.

He had to find a way to defuse it without damaging the League, Lois, and, preferably, himself at the same time. Because Clark was spoiling for something - most likely a fight, although, at the very least another argument - preferably one where he tossed Bruce around a little.

He was just climbing into bed when he realised how he could defuse it.

It would be a calculated risk.

But in the end, weren’t all things?


	6. calculated

She was sitting on Bruce’s bed in the dawning light, eating toast and coffee.

He saw that much before he looked away, unable to take the churning in his stomach when Bruce made a comment and she half-smiled at it.

And when she arrived back in Metropolis, she was as polite and distant to him as a stranger who just happened to be wearing the ring he’d given his wife on their wedding day.

Her bruises looked livid in the broad light of day, and their presence quelled a good portion of the anger he was feeling at the thought of her in Bruce’s room.

Diana was one thing - she was a team-mate and one of his closest friends, as well as...well, as well as his one-time lover. But she wasn’t his _wife_.

The wife whom he’d bruised last night, too eager to have her in his arms again, to get over what he’d done and forget the guilt that niggled at him in the corner of his mind.

The wife to whom he’d betrayed himself last night.

“I’m sorry,” he said as she put her keys down on the table.

She looked at him with a semblance of calm, although her pulse was beating madly and she was in a state close to panic. “You said that last night.” Her voice only trembled a little, she had control of it now, even if she looked exhausted.

In spite of the voice that told him, quite firmly, that Bruce would never have touched Lois like that, Clark was uncomfortably reminded of himself promising to Lois that he would never touch Diana like that - that they were just friends.

He reached out to touch the bruises at her throat and wasn’t entirely surprised to see her flinch. Instead, he indicated his own throat and shoulders. “About those,” he clarified. “I’m sorry.”

“Yeah, well, if you hadn’t been screwing around with your supergirlfriend...”

“She is not my supergirlfriend,” he said immediately, and stood. That was a mistake. Standing, he had the advantage of height and build, and intimidation had never worked with Lois. “Look, it happened once. It was a mistake, and I’m sorry.”

And he _was_ sorry. He’d put his friendship with Diana on the line if her withdrawl was any indication, and he’d put his relationship with Lois on the line if _her_ withdrawl was any indication.

She snorted, in disbelief. “Yeah. You’re sorry. I can see that, Clark. You’re so sorry you _didn’t even tell me_.”

“Lois...”

“Tell me something, Clark. Was she as good as you’ve been imagining all these years we’ve been married?”

“Dammit, Lois, will you stop making it about Diana and I?”

“Kind of hard,” she replied, harshly. “Considering _you_ were the one that slept with her!”

His patience only had so long a leash. “So what were you doing on Bruce’s bed this morning?”

She tossed her head, “What did it look like? We were eating breakfast.”

“And you just happened to be in his room?”

“I just happened to open my door as Alfred was taking him breakfast and offered to take it in for him. Besides, I wanted to talk to him.”

“What about?”

She snorted, “And he thinks _he’s_ the paranoid one.” Without answering his question, Lois crossed the room and vanished into their bedroom. “I don’t want to talk about this now.”

“Then when?” He followed after her, caught her arm and felt her muscles tense even before she gasped in pain.

He’d done it again - forgotten his strength in the force of his emotions.

Gently, almost painstakingly, she pulled out of his grip. “Look, Clark, don’t bother going in to work today,” she said. “I’ll tell Perry you’re sick.”

“Lois...”

“Clark, not now.” Her voice was brisk and brusque; she didn’t want to deal with him and he hated it.

He put a hand across the bathroom door before she could go in. “Then when? Set a time when we’ll talk and we will.”

She sighed and her shoulders fell. “It’s taking everything I have to just talk to you right now, Clark. I can’t handle anything more - I need some time to deal with it.”

“How much time?”

“I don’t _know_ how much time! I’ve never had to deal with my husband sleeping with a work colleague that he _told_ me was just a friend.” Her voice broke and she turned away, “I’m hurting, Clark, and just _looking_ at you now hurts.”

Looking at her hurt, too - because _she_ was hurting and _he_ was the reason she was hurting.

He knew he should just turn away, should just leave and let her alone for a while, but he had to know. “Are you going to stay?”

She looked up at him, only briefly, before she shook her head. “I don’t know. Ask me another time.”

He had to be content with that answer, at least for the moment.

That first day was the worst.

To mark time, he went up to the Watchtower, restless and a little bit angry. Ordinarily, he would have sparred with Diana, but when he offered it, she refused, citing other commitments. He wasn’t so sure he could blame her, either. After a stilted inquiry about Lois and a stilted answer, they stared at each other for a long moment, then started when Green Lantern came into the room, and hurriedly went about their other duties.

He was very much aware when she went back down Earthside around midday, back to the embassy and her work there. They’d always been aware of each other, now they were too aware of each other in ways that they shouldn’t be.

He loved her, yes. If it wasn’t for Lois, well, who knew?

He just wasn’t sure he could totally give her up. They had to work together, after all, he was the putative leader of the League, she was his second-in-command - they worked together well, and always had. And if there’d been the sparkling attraction that arced between them from time to time...well, he knew that she felt things for Arthur and Bruce, too.

Except now he really knew what she felt like - and tasted, sounded, and smelled like.

And _that_ was dangerous - for more than just proximity’s sake.

It might have lost him Lois.

Lois was out until very late after work, and when she did come back, she took one look at him in the bed, and took herself out to the couch. And before she fell asleep, he heard her mutter, “ _Should’ve taken him up on his offer._ ”

That thought haunted him most of the night.

Never mind that his intellect told him that Bruce wouldn’t have offered her anything more than somewhere to sleep, the tendrils of his jealous imagination could picture a lot more. Satin sheets, wine and roses, a man whose reputation among women was legendary - and he had to have gotten that reputation from _somewhere_.

She’d once commented on the attraction of the tall, dark, handsome brooding type, making a joke of it. Clark, she’d said, simply lacked the brood factor.

Bruce didn’t.

It was stupid to compare himself to Bruce: the two of them were miles apart, from different worlds, opposite ends of the spectrum. But right now, Bruce was the one dragging Diana through the streets of Gotham, chasing after the criminals of that dark, unlovely city; and Bruce was the one spending time with Clark’s wife. Clark’s lovely, driven, wholly- _human_ wife, who was trying to get over her husband’s betrayal.

He tried not to think of what measures ‘getting over’ his betrayal might entail.

Clark buried his face in the pillow and _didn’t_ think of Diana.

Morning brought no relief; only another curt dismissal from Lois. Clark was reported in sick and went back up to the Watchtower, like a husband relegated to the doghouse. It was a more apt metaphor than he cared to admit.

At lunchtime, he considered calling Lois, then realised he didn’t know what to say. And he was afraid of being fobbed off yet again. That didn’t stop him from looking for her, though. X-ray vision was a blessing.

She was in the middle of a lunchtime interview according to her diary. No name, just the time and ‘lunch interview at Akiras’. Another appointment had been crossed out to make way for this one, so it was a recent change. Akiras was expensive though, so she had to be interviewing someone fairly important.

When he found her on the top-level terrace of the luxury restaurant, she seemed pale-faced and a little tired. What was odd, though, was that she wasn’t taking notes. Her palm pilot was out and so was her recorder, but she wasn’t half as intent on the interview as she usually was.

Then he saw who she was ‘interviewing’.

More than one woman in the newsroom had sighed over Bruce Wayne at some stage or another. Sighed, and then commented on his atrocious track record with women. And certainly the playboy was gaining more than a few sideways glances from the women seated at the tables around him and Lois.

And one increasingly angry glare from Lois Lane’s husband out in space.

He tried to look away, and couldn’t. Not when Bruce was bringing out all the little things that he used to charm women: pushing back the lock of hair that fell down over his eyes, touching her hand when he wanted her to listen to something he said, smiling with a knowing look in his eye, and paying for the bill.

Lois, damn her, sat there and lapped it all up.

Contrary as the woman he’d married was, she rarely let anyone else pay her bill. Even Clark came under suspicion of ‘patronising’ her - and he was her husband!

But he watched, jealousy slowly creeping through his senses, as Lois let Bruce pay, let him put on her coat, and let him escort her out of the restaurant - all without so much as a single word being written on the ‘interview’.

He couldn’t hear what they were talking about, not from this distance, and he wasn’t sure he wanted to hear either. Bad enough to witness the quick kiss Lois gave Bruce before Alfred opened the door to let her out of the limousine. On the cheek, yes; but there had been a moment her mouth had almost hovered over the other man’s, and Clark had felt hot and cold and tense all over.

It had been one thing when Diana started spending time in Gotham. Surprising, a little unexpected, and more than a little uncomfortable - especially since Clark couldn’t quite rid himself of the knowledge that Bruce loved Diana just as fiercely as he did.

But this was _Lois_.

She had a history with Bruce - there was no secret about that; but that had been before - long before she married Clark. And she’d assured him that nothing had really happened. A few kisses and some light petting, but they’d never slept together.

But now, he wondered.

He wondered as Bruce grabbed Lois’ hand just before she exited the vehicle and kissed it, a quirk to his mouth as he grinned. He wondered as she tugged her hand back from Bruce, rolling her eyes as she took her bag and walked back into the office. And he wondered as he watched her sit at her desk, wool-gathering, for a whole two minutes before she heaved a sigh and began typing up her story, ignoring the rest of the interested newsroom.

Bruce was paranoid. That much was known.

Had Lois _lied_ to him about Bruce?

He sat in the hover-chair in the monitor room, barely paying attention to the screens that flickered up around him, too busy nursing his grudge against his team-mate.

A few hours later, when Batman stepped out of the transporters, Superman was waiting for him.

“We need to talk.”

He could see the eyebrow that quirked, even as Batman walked past him. “We do?”

“I don’t appreciate your appropriation of my wife, Bruce.”

“And I don’t think you appreciate that she’s not a chattel to be appropriated, _Clark,_ ” the other man returned as he crossed the hallway. “She wanted some time and space and someone to talk to.” He shrugged. “Since the circumstances of her husband’s affair are...unusual, she needed someone to talk to who could understand the difficulties of it.”

“And you just happened to be there?”

The faint smile he got was lightly feral, “I offered myself as an ear to chew.”

The thought of Lois literally chewing on Bruce’s ear was not a happy one. Clark stifled a quiver of rage and merely asked, “A shoulder to cry on?”

“Among other things.”

He knew it had to be a goad, but his emotions were in control of him at this moment. One hand came down hard on the other man’s arm. He could crush flesh to bone if he wanted. He didn’t. Instead, his voice had a flaying chill to it. “Exactly what ‘other things’ are we talking about?”

“Are you sure you want to know?” Definitely a goad.

“I think it’s definitely my business,” Clark said. “More my business than your interference between Diana and me.”

Batman slipped out of his grip nimbly enough and kept walking. “And I repeat. It became my business when she came to me and asked for my help.” He didn’t even look back at Clark as he added, “You really should keep better hold of your women, Clark. Two for two is _not_ good history.”

The part of him that was rationally pointing out that this was all a goad tried to warn him against his anger.

The part of him that ran older and fiercer and far, far deeper than his rational mind reacted upon instinct.

Batman tumbled into the training room, rolling over and over and climbing to his feet. “Is this really necessary?” The voice wasn’t quite Batman’s no-nonsense tones, nor Bruce Wayne’s innuendo-laden ones. There was a cruelty in the tones that stung him; he’d never heard such a tone from either Batman or Bruce Wayne. “It’s not my fault you can’t keep your wife.”

 _I_ can _keep her if not for meddling playboys who should know better!_ He swung the second blow, expecting some kind of retaliation for his action; a batarang, or maybe a handful of red kryptonite in the face.

There was none.

It had to hurt, even glancing off the other man’s cheekbone as Batman dodged the blow. In toys and gadgets and knick-knacks, Batman was supreme. When it came to pure strength, there was no doubt who would win.

However, Batman wasn’t pulling out any of his toys. He was dodging the blows - but only just, and only because Clark wasn’t hitting at super-speed.

 _Come on, Bruce!_ Clark thought, angrily. _What are you waiting for?_

There had to be something else going on behind that mask. Something else that Clark hadn’t thought of - that Bruce had in waiting. Because there was no way that Bruce would just let Clark whale on him like this.

Except that he was.

_Superman, do you know what you are doing?_

_Be quiet, J’onn, and get out of my head._ Angry, and just getting angrier, Clark fisted his hands and followed after the tumbling form of his team-mate. From the smirk on Batman’s lips, he had the feeling he was being played; the sensation that this was all a joke of some kind. He was going to get the bottom of this and he didn’t care what he had to do to get there.

He caught the other man by the throat, careful not to crush the windpipe - not yet, anyway. “What’s this about, Bruce?”

The adam’s apple was working hard, even as the gauntleted hands gripped Clark’s wrist. He wasn’t trying to make Clark let go - he knew better than that, but he was easing the strain on his throat.

“Kal!” That was Diana, coming up behind him. She caught at the arm holding Batman up, hauling it down - the only one with the strength to challenge him like that. “What are you doing?”

“Stay out of this, Diana,” he warned.

Ignoring him, she interposed herself between him and Batman. “I will not stand by and watch you beat--”

She got no further than that. The smirk that crawled across Bruce’s face was intolerable.

He felt no compunction in brushing her out of his way. He and Diana were well aware of how much battering the other could take where necessary. He heard her cry of shock as she went flying, the thump as she hit the wall and slid to the floor, but his attention was on Batman.

“Another woman who’ll have a set of bruises with your name on them.” The sneer was a Batman-patented special. “Are you like Lex now? Need your women to match?” He dodged the next blow. “Of course,” he noted, vindictively. “That would mean I’d have to actually _sleep_ with Diana.”

It was like a knife through his soul, like kryptonite in his veins.

Lois in Bruce’s bed, either now or then, lying to Clark, making him believe there’d been nothing between them, letting him marry and love her and never telling him the truth that his friend knew exactly what it was like to sleep in her arms, to move in her body, to listen to her breathless laughter, so many years and all the time they’d been _lying_ to him...

A red haze covered his vision, and this time, Batman barely managed to dodge the blow. No cry came from the other man’s mouth, though, and he didn’t falter as the toe of Superman’s boot caught him in the ribcage, tossing him head over heels across the room.

The only thing in his mind was to make Bruce _pay_ for claiming not only Diana but Lois. They had gone to him in the aftermath of that night, and each woman had found what they were seeking from him - something Clark could not give them.

 _Did you sleep with her?_ He’d asked once in a moment of honesty, needing to know so he could deal with the answer. And Bruce’s response had been dry, _The playboy is a useful reputation to have; not all of it has to be fact. No, I didn’t sleep with her._

Lies. All of it. Lies in friendship and lies in marriage. Two people he’d loved and trusted - and he’d been betrayed by both of them.

Anger swirled through him. He barely registered the voices of his team-mates yelling at him, barely saw the glow of the construct that Lantern tried to put in his path. It broke with a flurry of blows and Clark strode forward, seeing only the man who rose to his booted feet, wiping blood from his mouth.

One fist drew back to deliver a single blow that would snap Bruce’s neck, even as the other man reached up in a gesture that would be no defence at all against this punch.

It was not intended to be defence against the killing blow. Instead, Batman yanked his mask from his face, tearing it back from his forehead and hair as he stared Clark full in the eyes.

There was no way Clark could avoid looking into the eyes of the man whose death sentence flew through the air to his cheek.

Bruce Wayne’s eyes were blue and calm, even in the midst of such an uneven battle. For a man who’d watched the woman he loved go to Clark instead, who’d found himself in the role of comforter and mainstay for Lois in the face of her husband’s betrayal, there was no resentment or jealousy in the handsome face. For a man who’d secretly set up protocols to stop his fellow League members from ever becoming a danger to the world they’d protected, there was no deceit in his expression now. There were no secrets, no lies, no prevarications; just a man’s eyes regarding his killer with an expression of absolute trust.

Six billion people on Earth knew of Superman, looked up to him, trusted him. The face of the man before him was one of them - one of the multitude Clark had promised to protect with the powers that his parents had taught him were a gift to be used in the service of all humanity.

 _All_ humanity. Even the ones who betrayed him. Because he was Superman and they were not.

But that was only one half of the punchline.

The other was a connection, set up by J’onn, linked between him and Bruce, with only one thought resonating clear and firm and honest between them - no lies from mind to mind: _We never did, Clark._

Clark’s knuckles stopped a hair’s breadth from smashing the perfect cheekbone into splinters.

Bruce never so much as flinched. Damn the man.

Clark dropped his fist, suddenly trembling with the reaction of everything he’d just felt and everything he’d been made to feel by the careful planning of the man who looked into Clark’s eyes and simply blinked, veiling and unveiling themselves with languid calm.

When the dark lashes rose, Bruce’s expression stood with the grim regret of respect lost and friendship faded. Deliberate, of course - the man did nothing without due thought. And Clark looked beyond the face of the man he’d once called friend, and saw the lost respect of billions in Bruce’s eyes.

 _You let your emotions rule you, Clark,_ Bruce said, still through the link. _You can’t afford that. None of us can._

The ‘us’ was inclusive - hinting at more than just the two of them.

And Clark looked around the room, and saw the echo of Bruce’s regret on the faces of their team-mates staring from the windows of the training room, witness to an unexpected fight between two of their own. He saw horror and revusion in their faces, quickly masked; a deep, terrible sadness in the alien planes of J’onn’s face; and the gleam of unshed tears in Diana’s eyes as she picked herself up from the floor where he’d tossed her like so much debris.

It was almost more than he could take.

He couldn’t deal with everything at this moment. He wasn’t Bruce to process a dozen thoughts in an instant and follow through the logical course of those thoughts.

But before he could move, a gauntleted hand caught his forearm with a grip that was hard for a human.

“It’s all about control, Clark,” Bruce said quietly. “And what happens when you lose it.”

Clark turned on his heel, wrenching his arm from the other man’s touch as he walked out, unable to bear his team-mate’s gaze. Bruce had orchestrated this, and he should have been angry.

He’d _been_ angry. Driven to it, goaded to it, allowing his instincts to take over, and losing the control his parents had taught him.

_It’s all about control - and what happens when you lose it._

In that statement was contained the fullness of his mistake with Diana - the fullness of his mistake in letting his jealousy take him over.

He wasn’t sure where he walked, only that he passed through the corridors alone, seeking somewhere where he could stand and think - truly _think_ about what all this meant and how he was going to deal with it.

He’d nearly killed a team-mate - out of an imagined jealousy that his mind had known was impossible, but which his emotions had overruled; and further back - out of a moment’s desire, passion and abandon that might yet cost him three of the most precious relationships in his world.

He’d once accused Bruce of splitting the League with his distrust and suspicion.

Humiliating to discover that even Superman was better at pointing out the splinter in another’s eye than attending to the beam in his own.

Clark found a window that overlooked the globe of the earth, and put his head into his hands.


	7. consequences

He slipped the mask back over his features, as calmly as if he hadn’t just faced death in the form of a former friend.

Then he turned on his heel and walked away without a word.

He had to be hurting in some way. At the least, the bruises would ache. Kal hadn’t been gentle. She wanted to go after him, but couldn’t. Physically couldn’t. The wall she leaned against was holding her up, slightly wobbly after Kal’s casual backhanded swipe had taken her out of the arena.

There was a head and an arm under her shoulder, propping her up. Kyle flung an arm around her back. “Diana, you okay?” She used his solid assistance with relief, drawing herself up. “Man, what got into Superman?”

 _Jealousy,_ she thought to herself, _a lack of self-control._ And, knowing Kal, he would berate himself for it; especially after Bruce had shown him so plainly what he’d done.

The reaction to Bruce’s ploy only hit her now, shaking her with unstoppeable force. He’d put his life on the line - and it had very nearly cost him. Something sparked in her brain, and she felt fury collect in her blood.

“I’m fine,” she managed, levering herself off the wall. “No, really,” she added when he caught her arm, helping her stand, “I’m good.”

“Shaken, not stirred?” Kyle asked dryly. “I’d ask what’s going on, but I don’t think I’d like the answer.” He stared off in the direction Kal had walked.

Diana was not minded to face Kal at present. His fall had been very public, and she had a feeling he was going through the same recognition she had a week ago. “Batman?”

“In the monitor rooms.” The young man shook his head. “Those hits had to hurt.”

 _They probably do._ Diana thought. _He’s just being his usual stoic self._

And when she found him, sitting at one of the terminals, pulling up reams of data, he _was_ being his usual stoic self, never mind that she knew he was suffering bruises from Kal’s hits.

“You should get Alfred to see to those when you get back.”

He shrugged. “It’s nothing.”

 _You still need to pretend, even before me, Bruce?_ But he did, and she knew it. His composure was final and his control was absolute. Hadn’t he shown it as he saw Kal’s fist descend upon him?

Diana wondered if she’d have nightmares about that blow for a while yet. Nightmares where Kal didn’t stop, didn’t realise what Bruce wanted him to realise, didn’t regret anything. Nightmares where she lost two men she loved in a single instant: the first destroyed by his rage, the second killed by the first.

She watched him a while, saying nothing, not reading what he typed, not watching the monitor screens: watching _him_. Man and mystery, human and hero, Bruce and Batman - a plethora of dichotomies, bound up in one being.

He was only human, and yet he was so much more than that. She’d seen that long ago, admired it, forgotten it a while, and was remembering with a vengeance now.

If he minded the silence, he said nothing to her, and, eventually, she had to ask the question. “So what happens now?”

She’d asked it before - that first night she’d come to him, her beliefs in shambles, the lasso burning skin and soul, and lost for somewhere to go, something to do.

He finished typing in whatever he was doing and sat back in his chair. A final tap to the keyboard executed whatever program on which he’d been working, and he turned his head towards her. “Now, we see what the League is made of.”

And, as if on cue, J’onn’s voice sounded in their heads. _All League members to assemble in the briefing room immediately._

He got to his feet gracefully, although she saw the twitch at his jaw that indicated he was in greater pain than he let on. She held out one arm to stop him as he passed her by. “Promise me one thing,” she said quietly. “When this is over, promise you’ll go back to Gotham and let Alfred patch you up.”

The firm, straight line of his mouth tugged out to the side in a sardonic smile. “I never make promises I can’t keep, Princess.” And he stepped around her and strode out to meet the rest of the League.

Kal was already in place, but standing. J’onn was seated and looking pensive, he gave both Diana and Batman a calm, steady look. The others filed in moments later, each one taking their place with an anxious glance from Kal to Batman.

The silence had become long and uncomfortable when Kal finally spoke.

“I wish...” He swallowed hard. “I wish to tender my resignation from the League. Effective immediately.”

Diana looked at Batman. In fact, they were all looking at Batman, J’onn included, waiting for his cue.

And Batman sat there, fingers steepled, jaw unmoving. For all the movement he made, he might have been a statue placed in the chair. Finally, he roused himself from whatever thought he’d been in. “Any particular reason?” He asked dryly. “Other than the need to flagellate yourself in public?”

The mockery was not well-taken. Diana saw Lantern flinch slightly as Kal growled, “Do you think this is funny?”

“Amusement is the last thing I’m getting out of this.” Batman said. “I _do_ think you’re making more of it than you have to.”

“Says the man who I nearly killed an hour ago.”

“Says the man who goaded you into nearly killing him two hours ago.” Batman returned.

“And that makes it better?”

“Better than your reasons for resigning.”

“Which you happen to know?”

A gauntleted hand lifted, “One, loss of control by sleeping with your second-in-command making professional matters personal; two, loss of control by beating up a League member over what was essentially a personal matter; three, guilt over said loss of control hereby assauged by an appropriate statement of guilt and what equates to a public hanging.” Pause. “Don’t hesitate to tell me if I’m wrong.”

Diana caught the glances that came her way; she ignored them. If they hadn’t known, they’d guessed - it was obvious enough, she supposed. Their closeness of the last few weeks, followed by distance, her refuge in Gotham and the time she spent with Batman.

There was no protest from Kal. And Batman continued after a moment’s pause. “Your resignation is unacceptable, Superman. So you made some bad decisions. You acted like an idiot. Fine. Deal with it. You don’t get to run away from the aftermath. None of us do.”

The usually deep, resonant voice was dry and flat. Nobody else could get away with saying such a thing to Superman - not even Diana - and even for Batman to speak so bluntly was rare.

“And is that your final word?” The slight lean on the pronoun indicated that Kal knew exactly who was laying down the rules here.

“If there’s disagreement with my judgement, then people are welcome to voice it.”

Kal’s mouth tightened.

“If you wish,” J’onn said, breaking the silence with his own words, “the League will grant an absence of leave for you to deal with any personal matters.”

His inclination of the head was stiff, uncomfortable with what had been said and done. “That...that would be acceptable. To me, anyway.” The glance he gave Batman was slightly challenging, but Batman made no sign he’d seen it.

Things would be tense between them for a while - and not just between them, Diana realised, but between her and much of the League as well. Her team-mates - other than Kal, Bruce, and J’onn - would not quite look her in the eye. There was a difference between joking about something and having it proven. Everyone had commented on her closeness to Kal at some time. Actually realising that they had crossed a line and betrayed his wife made the situation beyond a joke.

So, when he strode from the room, and Batman stood to return to the monitor rooms, she followed after Kal.

He was floating up high, by one of the windows that overlooked the Earth, his hands clenched at his sides. There was no surprise when she flew up beside him, only a brief longing glance, pain-filled.

“He doesn’t like weakness.”

“In himself or others,” she agreed, but gently.

Kal sighed. “She’s still not talking to me.”

No. Diana could imagine that Lois was not.

“I love her, Diana. She’s my wife.”

“I never intended for...for that to happen,” she said. A hopeless refrain - wasn’t it said that the road to hell was paved with good intentions? They’d never intended for things to get this far - and, like Cassandra the prophetess of Troy, Bruce’s predictions had been ignored, and yet he had been forced to suffer the consequences of others’ disbelief.

“But it did. And we don’t get to run away from the aftermath.” Kal’s voice grew bitter - although, she guessed it was not at Bruce’s judgement or humiliation of him, so much as a basic wish to deny that there were consequences to actions.

Even Superman had his human side.

“No.” She took a deep breath. “We don’t.”

“I still don’t understand him.”

Her mouth twisted, and she looked away from the hard, openness of his profile into space. “I do,” she said, very softly.

After a week in Gotham, bathed in the night in which Batman hid his soul, she was afraid she understood him only too well - and understood what it was she could not have and how much she could not have it.

His gaze turned on her as he exhaled, a shudder wracking his broad frame. More than any other man, Kal trusted Bruce - or had trusted him; but more than any other man, he feared him, too. Bruce had a way of being unexpected, with undercurrents that could surprise.

“And will you act on that?” The words were ground from him, a jealousy he could not hold back.

Diana answered him honestly, without concealing the pain she felt at Bruce’s instant acceptance of Lois - showing her a tenderness he had denied Diana. Never mind that Lois deserved such gentleness from him and she did not. A part of her still felt...

...still felt betrayed.

“I have. He turned me down.” Not the first time he had reneged on possibilities, and probably not the last.

Did she want to keep trying? She was torn between hope and despair, possibilities and unlikelihoods, a man and a hero - one and the same man.

“Idiot.” There was contempt there, and pain, and anger. Strange layers upon layers of the complexities of the relationship between the two men, a melange of thoughts, feelings, emotions.

She smiled then, amused that he could both show jealousy at her love for Bruce, and contempt for Bruce’s rejection of it. It died swiftly.

“What will you do about Lois?” The question hurt, but it had to be asked. It was his primary concern at this moment - the separation that had driven him to such depths of anger that he had nearly killed a team-mate.

And she owed Lois.

“I don’t even know if she still wants me.” His first loyalty went to Lois and would as long as she was alive.

And even when the other woman was dead, Diana could not say that the other woman’s shadow would not come between them. Not after this.

It took her a long time to suggest to him the course of action that was pushing within her, insistent as the truth, insistent as the lasso’s burning in her soul. She was not so magnanimous that she could accept the claim Lois had on him as easily as he could accept Bruce’s claim on her. Perhaps because Kal lived with the witness of it before his eyes every time she and Bruce worked or sparred together, while Lois, real as she was, was a distant presence here, up at the Watchtower, or down in the Fortress.

Had been distant until the night she came to the Manor, seeking help from Bruce.

The reality was presented to her again in her mind’s eye - Lois’ bruises, her agony, her torment of betrayal - and Bruce’s hard demand after he had sent Lois to bed.

_What kind of truth is there in making a lie out of another woman’s love?_

Still, she was proud of the words she said, of the self-control she exercised as she spoke them with utmost gentleness.

“Maybe you should find out?”


	8. beginning

The bruising would fade. The cracked ribs might take a little longer, but they were bound, and he could work. Just. At the least, he could sit in his chair and orchestrate the tracking down of the men who’d formed the paedophile ring.

Or work monitor duty as necessary.

The doors behind him opened. He didn’t turn around.

There was only one person it could be, and he knew who it was even before they rose up beside him, arms crossed, jaw set.

“I’m sorry about the bruising.”

His shrug was slight, making the least of it. The other man had doubtless scanned him; he knew the full extent of Bruce’ injuries. “It happens in my line of work.” _And in my line of humanity._

This time the hestation was deliberate. “I’m sorry for what led up to the bruising, too.” And now there was the faintest hint of dry humour in Clark’s voice.

It forced Bruce to ask, “Is that sorry as in, ‘you regret it happened’, or sorry as in ‘you regret you got caught’?”

“Both,” Clark said. “And neither.”

No surprise at the ambiguity. Bruce wasn’t so sure he’d regret sleeping with Diana if his circumstances were the same as Clark’s.

“A holiday?”

“A leave of absence from the League. Drastic emergencies only.”

That might be more difficult than Clark had any idea of - it wasn’t in his nature to sit back and smell the roses when there were wrongs to right. Then again, considering the wrong he’d done his wife, it might be that rebuilding that relationship would take more energy than even Clark expected.

Silence again. They were stuck in silence - stuck between worlds, stuck between lives. J’onn had once deliberately made the observation that Clark and Bruce were very much alike as men; even to loving the same women. In that, they were stuck, too.

Bruce hoped Lois would be okay. It would take more than a leave of absence for her to work things out within her soul, and none of it would be pretty or comfortable. He almost wished he could be there for her.

Almost. He was the Batman after all.

“Drastic emergencies?”

“Darkseid, the Imperiex, a fleet of alien ships...”

“Drastic.”

It was about as lighthearted as they were going to get at this moment. Time would either mend the rents between them, or dry and curl the edges of the tear so there was no hope of fixing what had been broken.

“Why’d you taunt me into it?”

A small red dot flared briefly on one screen. Bruce pulled up the screen and checked the data. A minor chemical spill at a specific factory in Hungary. He left the flag where it was - it was a civil authorities concern, not League business.

“Your emotions were running you,” Bruce said flatly. “The way I presume they were when you slept with Diana.”

“And if you presumed wrong?”

He shrugged, ignoring the subtle malice of Clark’s voice. It would be a while before either of them stopped resenting the other for what they could and could not have. “Diana indicated that it was unexpected and unintentional - emotion-fuelled. I took her at her word considering she had the lasso around her wrist at the time.” He glanced slightly at the man beside him and zoomed the screen back from Hungary to the map of Eastern Europe.

“You screwed up. Or just screwed.” One corner of his mouth tugged, although his stomach was churning. Doubtless Clark could see that if he cared to. “You’re not the first man to mess up and I doubt you’ll be the last.”

“And if I’d messed up by killing you?”

Cynical humour twitched his mouth. “Then we wouldn’t be having this conversation.” The answer was not satisfactory for the other man, he could feel the frustration emanating from beside him. “You would have remembered who you were, what you swore to, sooner or later, Clark.”

“And if it meant your death?”

He shrugged, a more nonchalant gesture than was probably required. “Then it would have been the price for the world to have Superman back.”

“That’s not how it works.” The admission was low and pained.

“Maybe. Maybe not.” Another shrug. “It was a calculated risk.”

A _very_ calculated one, involving a self-control of steel. He would not easily forget the death that had come so close to him. He would not easily forget the betrayal that had stuck in him - vows or not, Clark had known he held the balance of power in their respective relationships with Diana, and he had used that against Bruce.

“And you always win.” There was a bitter note to Superman’s voice; an envy that surprised him. A meta envying a human? How novel.

No response was necessary. Superman knew perfectly well that the Batman didn’t always win - that Bruce Wayne had lost more to Clark Kent than either man was willing to bring up at this point in time.

The knowledge pricked him, and he squashed it. “Give my regards to Lois,” he said in plain dismissal. He said nothing more to the other man. They weren’t friends again. Not yet. But at least they knew where they stood now.

It was a beginning.

\--

It was hard not to go out flying at night; not to circle the city in the air.

Harder still to act normally when he overheard a conversation between her and Bruce the evening he came home from the Watchtower for his leave of absence.

“ _Tell me, Bruce, am I being an idiot? Will this really change anything?_ ”

“ _I don’t know everything, Lois_.”

“ _You didn’t answer the question about whether you think I’m an idiot_.”

“ _You’re no more an idiot than I am_ ,” Bruce replied with dry egotism.

She laughed then, a soft, slightly choked sound. “ _So, idiots together, then_?”

“ _As if we ever needed company in being idiots_.”

“ _True_.” Her sigh whispered through the receiver. “ _I have to go. Bruce_?”

“ _Lois_?”

“ _I hope things work out_.”

“ _So do I_.”

“ _And thanks_.”

“ _You’re welcome_.”

It was all the hope he had to go on - that Lois wanted thing to turn out right between them. Because he lay on the other side of the bed at night and listened to her sleep, or sometimes cry, and wished he’d never pushed the boundaries of his relationship with Diana.

In the first few days after he absented himself from the League, he spent some time at the Fortress, mostly rearranging things, and carefully putting away his memories of that night. Not lingering over them as he had at first, but carefully putting them aside, making himself remember other things - times with Lois rather than Diana.

It wasn’t easy, but nobody had promised him easy.

Especially not Lois.

“ _Lois..._ ”

“ _Clark, I said I needed time. Are you going to give me time, or are you going to try to make yourself feel better by pushing?_ ”

There were moments when he contemplated leaving it all. Giving up on this all-too-human relationship and turning his back on it.

He couldn’t.

He couldn’t because she was his and he was hers, and even if he’d betrayed her, the woman he woke up beside - the woman he _wanted_ to wake up beside - was Lois.

So he stayed on and went to work with her, dogged her when she tried to ditch him, and suggested small things for them to do together.

He gritted his teeth and stuck at it when she said ‘no’ again and again. He gritted his teeth and continued to reach out when she still didn’t want him to touch her. He gritted his teeth and kept going back home instead of running away to the Watchtower or the Fortress.

And every time he thought about leaving, he remembered the blunt words of Jonathan Kent telling a teenaged Clark, “ _Too many men give up and get out when it gets hard, Clark. They get tired of life or their work or their wife, and they opt out. They get out and start anew, but the problem isn’t their circumstances - the problem is them. So, after a while, the old troubles turn up and they get tired and run away again - it never stops. And the man who leaves behind too many of his responsibilities isn’t a man anymore: he’s a leech._ ”

Bruce would probably say it worked for metas just as well as it worked for men.

It was nearly two weeks before Lois said ‘yes’ to one of his ideas: her favourite ice-cream in the park on the way back from an interview. She walked beside him instead of two steps in front, and laughed when an adolescent boy crashed into her while roller-blading and landed them both in the flowerbeds.

She even let Clark help her up and brush her off, eyes sparkling as the kid picked himself up, looked at her, flushed, mumbled something and scrambled away.

And if she stiffened when she realised how close he was standing, or that she was letting him touch her without flinching, if she stepped back from him after a self-conscious moment, she nevertheless walked just a little closer to him all the way back to the office.

Clark had a sudden urge to leap tall buildings.

It was a beginning.

\--

It had been a month since she’d begun working with him in Gotham.

A month since the night she’d come to him, feeling tainted in the knowledge and memory of what she’d done to herself, to Kal, to Lois.

Kal was back among the League. Their interactions were not precisely comfortable - they were too aware of their companions watching them, judging them, too aware of the delicacy of his relationship with his wife, rebuilding day by day - but they worked. Only time and crisis would see if they would work under pressure and strain.

In the meantime, Diana had other matters to take her attention.

She was aware of the delicacy of her own rapport with Bruce, the fragility of it. Tolerance had given way to acceptance, but she was not _welcome_ in Gotham. At least, not by him.

The ‘Batclan’ accepted her, more or less. Nightwing and Robin teased her, Batgirl didn’t hold back against her in a fight, and Oracle offered dirty jokes and anecdotes of the whole clan. But Batman watched her, corrected her, informed her, and reprimanded her; and held back from her with exacting quietude.

The frustration of it fuelled her actions one night as she and Batgirl took care of a number of gang-related problems. She wasn’t in Gotham every night, of course; her own commitments in Gateway City also demanded of her time and energy. But Gotham had become a continuing interest of hers; growing upon her in all its unlovely gloom.

At the end of the night they returned to the Batcave and the man who sat in front of the computer systems in cowl and robe, feeding data through the screens. Batgirl’s description of Diana was succinct. “Has issues.”

The girl went to change and clean up, and Diana pulled her Hecate mask from her head with a sigh and hung it from the hook where she’d put her lasso earlier tonight.

“Issues?” She could hear the arch of his brow in the word, although he didn’t turn from the screens.

She regarded the curve of his head, the lines of throat and shoulders, back and bicep before her, gleaming dully with the reflected light from the monitors around him. Here, in his lair, she could observe him without shame or fear of discovery. The solitude gave her privacy, and the darkness freed her to study him, and study him she did.

He carried his darkness about him, like a snail carried its shell. Sometimes, Diana thought that, like a snail, he would be lost without it. Yet he was whole in his pain and his passion, as complete as any man or woman on this great planet would ever be: simply...different.

And she loved him in his darkness.

She hadn’t answered his question, and now he was watching her watching him, the opaque eyes of his cowl hiding his expression.

“Out of all the cities in America, you had to pick this one, Bruce,” she murmured. “The one city where the crime never stops.”

“The crime never stops in any other city, either.”

“But it _never_ stops in Gotham,” she said. “Not for anything or anyone - even you, Bruce.” And then the question that was nagging her. “Why do you keep doing it?”

Broad shoulders lifted and fell in a shrug. “Perhaps I have a fondness for lost causes.”

“Is that why you love me?”

The words were crueller than she’d meant them, instinctive from her lips, and there was a long moment when he didn’t move.

Diana berated herself for being reckless, for saying what she had not meant, for hurting him again. “I didn’t mean...”

“Yes,” he said, swivelling the chair to face her. “I think you did.”

“Bruce...”

“Diana.” And there was something soft and low in his voice, although the tones still itched in gravelled velvet. “You’re making this difficult for yourself. Nobody else.”

“Then make it easier for me.”

“How?”

“Kiss me.” The plea hung in the air between them, slowly chilling in the frigid air.

He turned back to the computer, abruptly, although she saw what might have been the faintest movement of his adam’s apple beneath the throat of his cowl. “I dislike being the consolation prize, Princess. It’s a human thing.”

Before she knew what she was doing, she’d yanked her lasso from the hook and pulled the coil tight around her wrist. “You are not the consolation prize, Bruce,” she said, knowing her voice held an element of desperation to it. “You never were, and never could be.”

She loved both men. She could no more help it than they could help being who and what they were. That circumstances and recklessness had led to her relationship with Kal was a function of situation. If it had been Bruce sparring with her in the Batcave, teasing her, touching her, kissing her, then she would have responded just as ardently. She knew that in her soul - she’d felt the hard tug of desire for him often enough these last few weeks.

The difference was that Bruce did not let go, he would not lose control, and he would not cross the line.

He sat too still now. She’d said too much. And now the rending would begin, because she had laid herself bare before him, and he would not do likewise - _could_ not do likewise.

As always, he surprised her.

One hand reached out stealthily and wound the tip of a finger into the coils of the lasso as the other pulled back his cowl from his face. Honesty and openness for one to whom felt he could not afford it, and the deep blue gaze of a man who knew his worth and counted it less than she did.

_We think of ourselves as freaks. As not good enough. Because of them._

“I’d like to believe you,” he said gently.

Stung, she protested. “The lasso...”

He held up his free hand, silencing her. “I believe you think you’re telling the truth, but _I_ don’t believe you.”

And the innate cynicism that was his nature.

Regret caught in her throat, and the question was yanked from her lips. “What would it take for you to believe it as truth?”

She saw him jerk slightly, his fingers still caught in the golden loops of the lasso. And while she hadn’t intended to force him to respond, it still compelled his true answer.

“If you could make love to me with the lasso wrapped around you, then I would be able to believe it.” The words escaped his lips, a brutal and unexpected revelation. He pulled his hand back from the lasso as though it had burned - and perhaps it had. Still, he kept his composure as he looked back at her and quietly said, “That wasn’t an invitation.”

Her body had taken it as such, stirring gently into warmth and desire. She leashed its hunger. “All I asked for was a kiss.”

The challenge was laid down, the gauntlet flung; he would accept her gage or walk away.

She knew what she expected, but she hoped otherwise.

Diana watched him as he stood there, waiting, watching, measuring, considering. He should not be coerced, would not accept any attempt to persuade his mind. She would have him of his own will and willingness, or not at all - no pleasant lies for either of them.

The moment stretched out, too far, too long, and she acknowledged her loss with something that was halfway between a smile and a wince.

It was a night for surprises. One gauntleted hand touched her cheek, turning her head towards him. “One kiss.”

A little imp moved within her. “I didn’t specify how many.”

One corner of his mouth twitched as he cradled her jaw and leaned in to her.

Skin touched skin, lightly, no urgency, no haste. Mouth moved in mouth, softly, no hesitation, no doubt.

Even in the midst of kissing Kal, she had known that there was a wrongness about what they were doing. She had known that there were consequences to be borne, an aftermath that could not be avoided.

There was none of that here.

Bruce’s mouth against hers was gentle, delicately sensuous, and oh, so sweet.

_...because I love you...kiss me...not the consolation prize...I’d like to believe...one kiss..._

Her hand came up to cradle his head, afraid that he might pull away too soon, too fast.

The night she’d come to him, the lasso had burned her flesh for her self-deceptions and lies. Now, she was surprised to find her fingers still full of its loops, half-draped over his shoulder.

And when he finally let her go - or she let him go; she didn’t know which it was - the taste of him in her mouth and against her skin held no taint at all.

Something not quite like a smile gleamed in his expression as he turned away, but she felt the warmth of it all through her belly.

It was a beginning.


End file.
